Vasiliki Kougia


2023

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Detecting Erroneously Recognized Handwritten Byzantine Text
John Pavlopoulos | Vasiliki Kougia | Paraskevi Platanou | Holger Essler
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Handwritten text recognition (HTR) yields textual output that comprises errors, which are considerably more compared to that of recognised printed (OCRed) text. Post-correcting methods can eliminate such errors but may also introduce errors. In this study, we investigate the issues arising from this reality in Byzantine Greek. We investigate the properties of the texts that lead post-correction systems to this adversarial behaviour and we experiment with text classification systems that learn to detect incorrect recognition output. A large masked language model, pre-trained in modern and fine-tuned in Byzantine Greek, achieves an Average Precision score of 95%. The score improves to 97% when using a model that is pre-trained in modern and then in ancient Greek, the two language forms Byzantine Greek combines elements from. A century-based analysis shows that the advantage of the classifier that is further-pre-trained in ancient Greek concerns texts of older centuries. The application of this classifier before a neural post-corrector on HTRed text reduced significantly the post-correction mistakes.

2022

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SepLL: Separating Latent Class Labels from Weak Supervision Noise
Andreas Stephan | Vasiliki Kougia | Benjamin Roth
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

In the weakly supervised learning paradigm, labeling functions automatically assign heuristic, often noisy, labels to data samples. In this work, we provide a method for learning from weak labels by separating two types of complementary information associated with the labeling functions: information related to the target label and information specific to one labeling function only. Both types of information are reflected to different degrees by all labeled instances. In contrast to previous works that aimed at correcting or removing wrongly labeled instances, we learn a branched deep model that uses all data as-is, but splits the labeling function information in the latent space. Specifically, we propose the end-to-end model SepLL which extends a transformer classifier by introducing a latent space for labeling function specific and task-specific information. The learning signal is only given by the labeling functions matches, no pre-processing or label model is required for our method. Notably, the task prediction is made from the latent layer without any direct task signal. Experiments on Wrench text classification tasks show that our model is competitive with the state-of-the-art, and yields a new best average performance.

2021

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Multimodal or Text? Retrieval or BERT? Benchmarking Classifiers for the Shared Task on Hateful Memes
Vasiliki Kougia | John Pavlopoulos
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2021)

The Shared Task on Hateful Memes is a challenge that aims at the detection of hateful content in memes by inviting the implementation of systems that understand memes, potentially by combining image and textual information. The challenge consists of three detection tasks: hate, protected category and attack type. The first is a binary classification task, while the other two are multi-label classification tasks. Our participation included a text-based BERT baseline (TxtBERT), the same but adding information from the image (ImgBERT), and neural retrieval approaches. We also experimented with retrieval augmented classification models. We found that an ensemble of TxtBERT and ImgBERT achieves the best performance in terms of ROC AUC score in two out of the three tasks on our development set.

2019

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A Survey on Biomedical Image Captioning
John Pavlopoulos | Vasiliki Kougia | Ion Androutsopoulos
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Shortcomings in Vision and Language

Image captioning applied to biomedical images can assist and accelerate the diagnosis process followed by clinicians. This article is the first survey of biomedical image captioning, discussing datasets, evaluation measures, and state of the art methods. Additionally, we suggest two baselines, a weak and a stronger one; the latter outperforms all current state of the art systems on one of the datasets.