Offense Detection in Dravidian Languages using Code-Mixing Index based Focal Loss

Over the past decade, we have seen exponential growth in online content fueled by social media platforms. Data generation of this scale comes with the caveat of insurmountable offensive content in it. The complexity of identifying offensive content is exacerbated by the usage of multiple modalities (image, language, etc.), code mixed language and more. Moreover, even if we carefully sample and annotate offensive content, there will always exist significant class imbalance in offensive vs non offensive content. In this paper, we introduce a novel Code-Mixing Index (CMI) based focal loss which circumvents two challenges (1) code mixing in languages (2) class imbalance problem for Dravidian language offense detection. We also replace the conventional dot product-based classifier with the cosine-based classifier which results in a boost in performance. Further, we use multilingual models that help transfer characteristics learnt across languages to work effectively with low resourced languages. It is also important to note that our model handles instances of mixed script (say usage of Latin and Dravidian - Tamil script) as well. Our model can handle offensive language detection in a low-resource, class imbalanced, multilingual and code mixed setting.

Transfer Learning for Oral Cancer Detection using Microscopic Images

Oral cancer has more than 83% survival rate if detected in its early stages, however, only 29% of cases are currently detected early. Deep learning techniques can detect patterns of oral cancer cells and can aid in its early detection. In this work, we present the first results of neural networks for oral cancer detection using microscopic images. We compare numerous state-of-the-art models via transfer learning approach and collect and release an augmented dataset of high-quality microscopic images of oral cancer. We present a comprehensive study of different models and report their performance on this type of data. Overall, we obtain a 10-15% absolute improvement with transfer learning methods compared to a simple Convolutional Neural Network baseline. Ablation studies show the added benefit of data augmentation techniques with finetuning for this task.