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Md Shad Akhtar

26 accepted papers

2026

MAMA-Memeia! Multi-Aspect Multi-Agent Collaboration for Depressive Symptoms Identification in Memes

AAAI 2026technical

Over the past years, memes have evolved from being exclusively a medium of humorous exchanges to one that allows users to express a range of emotions freely and easily. With the ever-growing utilization of memes in expressing depressive sentiments, we conduct a study on identifying depressive sympto

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Assess and Prompt: A Generative RL Framework for Improving Engagement in Online Mental Health Communities

EMNLP 2025

Online Mental Health Communities (OMHCs) provide crucial peer and expert support, yet many posts remain unanswered due to missing support attributes that signal the need for help. We present a novel framework that identifies these gaps and prompts users to enrich their posts, thereby improving engag

2025

QUENCH: Measuring the gap between Indic and Non-Indic Contextual General Reasoning in LLMs

COLING 2025main

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has created a need for advanced benchmarking systems beyond traditional setups. To this end, we introduce QUENCH, a novel text-based English Quizzing Benchmark manually curated and transcribed from YouTube quiz videos. QUENCH possesses masked entities and rat…

2025

Redefining Experts: Interpretable Decomposition of Language Models for Toxicity Mitigation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive fluency across diverse tasks, yet their tendency to produce toxic content remains a critical challenge for AI safety and public trust. Existing toxicity mitigation approaches primarily manipulate individual neuron activations, but these methods suff…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Target-Augmented Shared Fusion-based Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation Generation

NAACL 2025findings

Sarcasm is a linguistic phenomenon that intends to ridicule a target (e.g., entity, event, or person) in an inherent way. Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation (MuSE) aims at revealing the intended irony in a sarcastic post using a natural language explanation. Though important, existing systems overlooked…

2024

A Good Learner can Teach Better: Teacher-Student Collaborative Knowledge Distillation

ICLR 2024poster

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique used to transfer knowledge from a larger ''teacher'' model into a smaller ''student'' model. Recent advancements in meta-learning-based knowledge distillation (MetaKD) emphasize that the fine-tuning of teacher models should be aware of the student's need to…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Adding SPICE to Life: Speaker Profiling in Multiparty Conversations

COLING 2024main

In the realm of conversational dynamics, individual idiosyncrasies challenge the suitability of a one-size-fits-all approach for dialogue agent responses. Prior studies often assumed the speaker’s persona’s immediate availability, a premise not universally applicable. To address this gap, we explore…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

EROS:Entity-Driven Controlled Policy Document Summarization

COLING 2024main

Privacy policy documents have a crucial role in educating individuals about the collection, usage, and protection of users’ personal data by organizations. However, they are notorious for their lengthy, complex, and convoluted language especially involving privacy-related entities. Hence, they pose…

2024

Intent-conditioned and Non-toxic Counterspeech Generation using Multi-Task Instruction Tuning with RLAIF

NAACL 2024long

Counterspeech, defined as a response to mitigate online hate speech, is increasingly used as a non-censorial solution. The effectiveness of addressing hate speech involves dispelling the stereotypes, prejudices, and biases often subtly implied in brief, single-sentence statements or abuses. These ex…

2024

Knowledge Planning in Large Language Models for Domain-Aligned Counseling Summarization

EMNLP 2024main

In mental health counseling, condensing dialogues into concise and relevant summaries (aka counseling notes) holds pivotal significance. Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in various generative tasks; however, their adaptation to domain-specific intricacies remains challeng…

2024

No perspective, no perception!! Perspective-aware Healthcare Answer Summarization

ACL 2024findings

Healthcare Community Question Answering (CQA) forums offer an accessible platform for individuals seeking information on various healthcare-related topics. People find such platforms suitable for self-disclosure, seeking medical opinions, finding simplified explanations for their medical conditions,…

2024

Synthetic Data Generation and Joint Learning for Robust Code-Mixed Translation

COLING 2024main

The widespread online communication in a modern multilingual world has provided opportunities to blend more than one language (aka code-mixed language) in a single utterance. This has resulted a formidable challenge for the computational models due to the scarcity of annotated data and presence of n…

2024

Tox-BART: Leveraging Toxicity Attributes for Explanation Generation of Implicit Hate Speech

ACL 2024findings

Employing language models to generate explanations for an incoming implicit hate post is an active area of research. The explanation is intended to make explicit the underlying stereotype and aid content moderators. The training often combines top-k relevant knowledge graph (KG) tuples to provide wo…

2023

Counterspeeches up my sleeve! Intent Distribution Learning and Persistent Fusion for Intent-Conditioned Counterspeech Generation

ACL 2023long

Counterspeech has been demonstrated to be an efficacious approach for combating hate speech. While various conventional and controlled approaches have been studied in recent years to generate counterspeech, a counterspeech with a certain intent may not be sufficient in every scenario. Due to the com…

2023

Explaining (Sarcastic) Utterances to Enhance Affect Understanding in Multimodal Dialogues

AAAI 2023technical

Conversations emerge as the primary media for exchanging ideas and conceptions. From the listener’s perspective, identifying various affective qualities, such as sarcasm, humour, and emotions, is paramount for comprehending the true connotation of the emitted utterance. However, one of the major hur…

2023

From Multilingual Complexity to Emotional Clarity: Leveraging Commonsense to Unveil Emotions in Code-Mixed Dialogues

EMNLP 2023long main

Understanding emotions during conversation is a fundamental aspect of human communication, driving NLP research for Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC). While considerable research has focused on discerning emotions of individual speakers in monolingual dialogues, understanding the emotional d…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

MEMEX: Detecting Explanatory Evidence for Memes via Knowledge-Enriched Contextualization

ACL 2023long

Memes are a powerful tool for communication over social media. Their affinity for evolving across politics, history, and sociocultural phenomena renders them an ideal vehicle for communication. To comprehend the subtle message conveyed within a meme, one must understand the relevant background that…

2023

Manifold-Preserving Transformers are Effective for Short-Long Range Encoding

EMNLP 2023long findings

Multi-head self-attention-based Transformers have shown promise in different learning tasks. Albeit these models exhibit significant improvement in understanding short-term and long-term contexts from sequences, encoders of Transformers and their variants fail to preserve layer-wise contextual infor…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

What Do You MEME? Generating Explanations for Visual Semantic Role Labelling in Memes

AAAI 2023technical

Memes are powerful means for effective communication on social media. Their effortless amalgamation of viral visuals and compelling messages can have far-reaching implications with proper marketing. Previous research on memes has primarily focused on characterizing their affective spectrum and detec…

2022

DISARM: Detecting the Victims Targeted by Harmful Memes

NAACL 2022findings

Internet memes have emerged as an increasingly popular means of communication on the web. Although memes are typically intended to elicit humour, they have been increasingly used to spread hatred, trolling, and cyberbullying, as well as to target specific individuals, communities, or society on poli…

2022

Detecting and Understanding Harmful Memes: A Survey

IJCAI 2022poster

The automatic identification of harmful content online is of major concern for social media platforms, policymakers, and society. Researchers have studied textual, visual, and audio content, but typically in isolation. Yet, harmful content often combines multiple modalities, as in the case of memes.…

2022

Empowering the Fact-checkers! Automatic Identification of Claim Spans on Twitter

EMNLP 2022main

The widespread diffusion of medical and political claims in the wake of COVID-19 has led to a voluminous rise in misinformation and fake news. The current vogue is to employ manual fact-checkers to efficiently classify and verify such data to combat this avalanche of claim-ridden misinformation. How…

2022

Nice Perfume. How Long Did You Marinate in It? Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation

AAAI 2022technical

Sarcasm is a pervading linguistic phenomenon and highly challenging to explain due to its subjectivity, lack of context and deeply-felt opinion. In the multimodal setup, sarcasm is conveyed through the incongruity between the text and visual entities. Although recent approaches deal with sarcasm as…

2022

Public Wisdom Matters! Discourse-Aware Hyperbolic Fourier Co-Attention for Social Text Classification

NeurIPS 2022accept

Social media has become the fulcrum of all forms of communication. Classifying social texts such as fake news, rumour, sarcasm, etc. has gained significant attention. The surface-level signals expressed by a social-text itself may not be adequate for such tasks; therefore, recent methods attempted t…

2022

When did you become so smart, oh wise one?! Sarcasm Explanation in Multi-modal Multi-party Dialogues

ACL 2022long

Indirect speech such as sarcasm achieves a constellation of discourse goals in human communication. While the indirectness of figurative language warrants speakers to achieve certain pragmatic goals, it is challenging for AI agents to comprehend such idiosyncrasies of human communication. Though sar…

2021

MOMENTA: A Multimodal Framework for Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets

EMNLP 2021finding

Internet memes have become powerful means to transmit political, psychological, and socio-cultural ideas. Although memes are typically humorous, recent days have witnessed an escalation of harmful memes used for trolling, cyberbullying, and abuse. Detecting such memes is challenging as they can be h…