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.