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Taradheesh Bali – Dual Degree EH

Taradheesh Bali received her MS  Dual Degree in Exact Humanities (EH). Her research work was supervised by Dr. Radhika Mamidi. Here’s a summary of Taradheesh Bali’s thesis Understanding Pretense: A Study in Humour and Sarcasm:

What is common between Veg Biryani, Ronaldo and Donald Trump? All of them pretend to be something that they are not. Not Biryani, not the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) and not human. But again, many a true word is spoken in jest. We pretend just as we breathe. Pretense is observable all around us. Feigning sickness to avoid work, lying to get out of trouble, maintaining a persona or a child joyfully playing his doll are all instances of make-believe. Global platforms of communication have made the world smaller than ever before. With degrees of separation reducing by the day, we can now interact with numerous people almost instantly. More interactions means more dialogue among people, which means more pretense. Sometimes we even pretend about pretending, for example, when applying reverse psychology. The bottom-line is that, pretense is a very important phenomenon in our lives, which we exploit regularly. Therefore, it is only fitting that there be an account which rigorously analyses and explains pretense. No matter how grounded in reality, due to its nature, pretense always involves an element of fantasy. This role is fulfilled by imagination. It provides the necessary content and helps us in guiding an episode of pretense. The nature of this content however is a topic hotly contested in philosophy. Does it comprise of clear or fuzzy images? Or whether images form a part of it at all? Are there different forms of imagination? Moreover, can one even provide a distinction between different types of imagination? We discuss and answer all such questions in Chapter 2, and clear the air up regarding its nature and involvement in pretense. Having gathered all the information needed about imagination as an essential component of pretending, we then move on to the act itself. Pretense involves both mental as well as physical participation of our body. Therefore, an analysis of the cognitive aspects of pretense is necessary to ascertain the precise requirements for pretending. By studying, the two most definitive accounts, viz. metarepresentational account and the behavioural account of pretense we get to know about the important characteristics of pretending. Along the way, we also learn from their shortcomings to bolster our own command of the topic. After strengthening the theoretical backbone needed to properly understand the phenomenon of pretense, we apply our learning from the first three Chapters and proceed towards applying them in a computational paradigm. We are presented by the perfect problem in the shape of Humour and Sarcasm as two forms of pretense, where we can flex our knowledge and use it to improve the accuracy of existing computational systems. In Chapter 4 we work towards formulating the problem of determining different types of humor as a traditional classification task by feeding positive and negative datasets to a classifier. We develop a model to categorize various kinds of humour based on the mode of delivery, the theme of the joke and the topic of the joke. Then, we illustrate its functionality by applying it on a huge corpus one-liners. Finally, we bring closure to our work in Chapter 5. We make headway in detecting sarcasm by making use of contextual information derived from the history of the participants. Therefore, instead of treating the problem of detecting sarcasm as a mere lexical exercise, we have tried to model a system that tries to build an understanding of the whole process as a human would do.