[month] [year]

Best System Paper Award to Prof. Radhika Mamidi and Kartikey Pant

Prof. Radhika Mamidi and her student Kartikey Pant (5th year CLD) received Best System Paper Award for their research work on BERT-based Ensembles for Modeling Disclosure and Support in Conversational Social Media Text at Affective Content Analysis workshop in the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence at New York on 7 February. The other author of this paper, Tanvi Dadu, a student at Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi was an equal contributor to the research.

There is a growing interest in understanding how humans initiate and hold conversations. The affective understanding of conversations focuses on the problem of how speakers use emotions to react to a situation and to each other. In the CL-Aff Shared Task, the organizers released Get it \#OffMyChest dataset, which contains Reddit comments from casual and confessional conversations, labeled for their disclosure and supportiveness characteristics. In this paper, Prof. Radhika Mamidi and her team introduced a predictive ensemble model exploiting the finetuned contextualized word embeddings, RoBERTa and ALBERT. They showed that their model outperforms the base models in all considered metrics, achieving an improvement of 3% in the F1 score. They further conducted statistical analysis and outlined deeper insights into the given dataset while providing a new characterization of impact for the dataset.