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Cornelia Caragea

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

LLM-guided Semi-Supervised Approaches for Social Media Crisis Data Classification

Semi-supervised learning approaches have been investigated as a means to enhance the analysis of social media data in disaster management contexts. In this work, we present the first empirical evaluation of large language model (LLM) guided semi-supervised learning for crisis related tweet classification. We compare two recent LLM assisted semi-supervised methods, VerifyMatch and LLM guided Co-Training ( LG-CoTrain), against established semi-supervised baselines. Our results show that LG-CoTrain significantly outperforms classical semi-supervised approaches in low resource settings with 5, 10 and 25 labeled examples per class, achieving the highest averaged Macro F1 across events. VerifyMatch achieves competitive performance while also demonstrating strong calibration properties. As the number of labeled examples increases, the performance gap narrows and Self Training emerges as a strong baseline. We further observe that compact semi-supervised models can, in some cases, outperform very large LLMs operating in zero-shot settings. This finding highlights the potential of transferring knowledge from LLMs into smaller and more deployable models through LLM guided semi-supervised learning, offering a practical pathway for real world disaster response applications. Our project repository on Github is here.

preprint2026arXiv

MADIAVE: Multi-Agent Debate for Implicit Attribute Value Extraction

Implicit Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) is essential for accurately representing products in e-commerce, as it infers latent attributes from multimodal data. Despite advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), implicit AVE remains challenging due to the complexity of multidimensional data and gaps in vision-text understanding. In this work, we introduce MADIAVE, a multi-agent debate framework that employs multiple MLLM agents to iteratively refine inferences. Through a series of debate rounds, agents verify and update each other's responses, thereby improving inference performance and robustness. Experiments on the ImplicitAVE dataset demonstrate that even a few rounds of debate significantly boost accuracy, especially for attributes with initially low performance. We systematically evaluate various debate configurations, including identical or different MLLM agents, and analyze how debate rounds affect convergence dynamics. Our findings highlight the potential of multi-agent debate strategies to address the limitations of single-agent approaches and offer a scalable solution for implicit AVE in multimodal e-commerce.

preprint2022arXiv

A Data Cartography based MixUp for Pre-trained Language Models

MixUp is a data augmentation strategy where additional samples are generated during training by combining random pairs of training samples and their labels. However, selecting random pairs is not potentially an optimal choice. In this work, we propose TDMixUp, a novel MixUp strategy that leverages Training Dynamics and allows more informative samples to be combined for generating new data samples. Our proposed TDMixUp first measures confidence, variability, (Swayamdipta et al., 2020), and Area Under the Margin (AUM) (Pleiss et al., 2020) to identify the characteristics of training samples (e.g., as easy-to-learn or ambiguous samples), and then interpolates these characterized samples. We empirically validate that our method not only achieves competitive performance using a smaller subset of the training data compared with strong baselines, but also yields lower expected calibration error on the pre-trained language model, BERT, on both in-domain and out-of-domain settings in a wide range of NLP tasks. We publicly release our code.

preprint2022arXiv

Emotion analysis and detection during COVID-19

Crises such as natural disasters, global pandemics, and social unrest continuously threaten our world and emotionally affect millions of people worldwide in distinct ways. Understanding emotions that people express during large-scale crises helps inform policy makers and first responders about the emotional states of the population as well as provide emotional support to those who need such support. We present CovidEmo, ~3K English tweets labeled with emotions and temporally distributed across 18 months. Our analyses reveal the emotional toll caused by COVID-19, and changes of the social narrative and associated emotions over time. Motivated by the time-sensitive nature of crises and the cost of large-scale annotation efforts, we examine how well large pre-trained language models generalize across domains and timeline in the task of perceived emotion prediction in the context of COVID-19. Our analyses suggest that cross-domain information transfers occur, yet there are still significant gaps. We propose semi-supervised learning as a way to bridge this gap, obtaining significantly better performance using unlabeled data from the target domain.

preprint2022arXiv

On the Calibration of Pre-trained Language Models using Mixup Guided by Area Under the Margin and Saliency

A well-calibrated neural model produces confidence (probability outputs) closely approximated by the expected accuracy. While prior studies have shown that mixup training as a data augmentation technique can improve model calibration on image classification tasks, little is known about using mixup for model calibration on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this paper, we explore mixup for model calibration on several NLU tasks and propose a novel mixup strategy for pre-trained language models that improves model calibration further. Our proposed mixup is guided by both the Area Under the Margin (AUM) statistic (Pleiss et al., 2020) and the saliency map of each sample (Simonyan et al.,2013). Moreover, we combine our mixup strategy with model miscalibration correction techniques (i.e., label smoothing and temperature scaling) and provide detailed analyses of their impact on our proposed mixup. We focus on systematically designing experiments on three NLU tasks: natural language inference, paraphrase detection, and commonsense reasoning. Our method achieves the lowest expected calibration error compared to strong baselines on both in-domain and out-of-domain test samples while maintaining competitive accuracy.

preprint2022arXiv

On the Evaluation of Answer-Agnostic Paragraph-level Multi-Question Generation

We study the task of predicting a set of salient questions from a given paragraph without any prior knowledge of the precise answer. We make two main contributions. First, we propose a new method to evaluate a set of predicted questions against the set of references by using the Hungarian algorithm to assign predicted questions to references before scoring the assigned pairs. We show that our proposed evaluation strategy has better theoretical and practical properties compared to prior methods because it can properly account for the coverage of references. Second, we compare different strategies to utilize a pre-trained seq2seq model to generate and select a set of questions related to a given paragraph. The code is available.

preprint2022arXiv

SciNLI: A Corpus for Natural Language Inference on Scientific Text

Existing Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets, while being instrumental in the advancement of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) research, are not related to scientific text. In this paper, we introduce SciNLI, a large dataset for NLI that captures the formality in scientific text and contains 107,412 sentence pairs extracted from scholarly papers on NLP and computational linguistics. Given that the text used in scientific literature differs vastly from the text used in everyday language both in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure, our dataset is well suited to serve as a benchmark for the evaluation of scientific NLU models. Our experiments show that SciNLI is harder to classify than the existing NLI datasets. Our best performing model with XLNet achieves a Macro F1 score of only 78.18% and an accuracy of 78.23% showing that there is substantial room for improvement.

preprint2020arXiv

Detecting Perceived Emotions in Hurricane Disasters

Natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes) affect millions of people each year, causing widespread destruction in their wake. People have recently taken to social media websites (e.g., Twitter) to share their sentiments and feelings with the larger community. Consequently, these platforms have become instrumental in understanding and perceiving emotions at scale. In this paper, we introduce HurricaneEmo, an emotion dataset of 15,000 English tweets spanning three hurricanes: Harvey, Irma, and Maria. We present a comprehensive study of fine-grained emotions and propose classification tasks to discriminate between coarse-grained emotion groups. Our best BERT model, even after task-guided pre-training which leverages unlabeled Twitter data, achieves only 68% accuracy (averaged across all groups). HurricaneEmo serves not only as a challenging benchmark for models but also as a valuable resource for analyzing emotions in disaster-centric domains.

preprint2020arXiv

Identifying Documents In-Scope of a Collection from Web Archives

Web archive data usually contains high-quality documents that are very useful for creating specialized collections of documents, e.g., scientific digital libraries and repositories of technical reports. In doing so, there is a substantial need for automatic approaches that can distinguish the documents of interest for a collection out of the huge number of documents collected by web archiving institutions. In this paper, we explore different learning models and feature representations to determine the best performing ones for identifying the documents of interest from the web archived data. Specifically, we study both machine learning and deep learning models and "bag of words" (BoW) features extracted from the entire document or from specific portions of the document, as well as structural features that capture the structure of documents. We focus our evaluation on three datasets that we created from three different Web archives. Our experimental results show that the BoW classifiers that focus only on specific portions of the documents (rather than the full text) outperform all compared methods on all three datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

On Identifying Hashtags in Disaster Twitter Data

Tweet hashtags have the potential to improve the search for information during disaster events. However, there is a large number of disaster-related tweets that do not have any user-provided hashtags. Moreover, only a small number of tweets that contain actionable hashtags are useful for disaster response. To facilitate progress on automatic identification (or extraction) of disaster hashtags for Twitter data, we construct a unique dataset of disaster-related tweets annotated with hashtags useful for filtering actionable information. Using this dataset, we further investigate Long Short Term Memory-based models within a Multi-Task Learning framework. The best performing model achieves an F1-score as high as 92.22%. The dataset, code, and other resources are available on Github.

preprint2016arXiv

A Search/Crawl Framework for Automatically Acquiring Scientific Documents

Despite the advancements in search engine features, ranking methods, technologies, and the availability of programmable APIs, current-day open-access digital libraries still rely on crawl-based approaches for acquiring their underlying document collections. In this paper, we propose a novel search-driven framework for acquiring documents for scientific portals. Within our framework, publicly-available research paper titles and author names are used as queries to a Web search engine. Next, research papers and sources of research papers are identified from the search results using accurate classification modules. Our experiments highlight not only the performance of our individual classifiers but also the effectiveness of our overall Search/Crawl framework. Indeed, we were able to obtain approximately 0.665 million research documents through our fully-automated framework using about 0.076 million queries. These prolific results position Web search as an effective alternative to crawl methods for acquiring both the actual documents and seed URLs for future crawls.

preprint2015arXiv

Entity-Specific Sentiment Classification of Yahoo News Comments

Sentiment classification is widely used for product reviews and in online social media such as forums, Twitter, and blogs. However, the problem of classifying the sentiment of user comments on news sites has not been addressed yet. News sites cover a wide range of domains including politics, sports, technology, and entertainment, in contrast to other online social sites such as forums and review sites, which are specific to a particular domain. A user associated with a news site is likely to post comments on diverse topics (e.g., politics, smartphones, and sports) or diverse entities (e.g., Obama, iPhone, or Google). Classifying the sentiment of users tied to various entities may help obtain a holistic view of their personality, which could be useful in applications such as online advertising, content personalization, and political campaign planning. In this paper, we formulate the problem of entity-specific sentiment classification of comments posted on news articles in Yahoo News and propose novel features that are specific to news comments. Experimental results show that our models outperform state-of-the-art baselines.

preprint2015arXiv

Privacy Prediction of Images Shared on Social Media Sites Using Deep Features

Online image sharing in social media sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram can lead to unwanted disclosure and privacy violations, when privacy settings are used inappropriately. With the exponential increase in the number of images that are shared online every day, the development of effective and efficient prediction methods for image privacy settings are highly needed. The performance of models critically depends on the choice of the feature representation. In this paper, we present an approach to image privacy prediction that uses deep features and deep image tags as feature representations. Specifically, we explore deep features at various neural network layers and use the top layer (probability) as an auto-annotation mechanism. The results of our experiments show that models trained on the proposed deep features and deep image tags substantially outperform baselines such as those based on SIFT and GIST as well as those that use "bag of tags" as features.

preprint2014arXiv

Keyword and Keyphrase Extraction Using Centrality Measures on Collocation Networks

Keyword and keyphrase extraction is an important problem in natural language processing, with applications ranging from summarization to semantic search to document clustering. Graph-based approaches to keyword and keyphrase extraction avoid the problem of acquiring a large in-domain training corpus by applying variants of PageRank algorithm on a network of words. Although graph-based approaches are knowledge-lean and easily adoptable in online systems, it remains largely open whether they can benefit from centrality measures other than PageRank. In this paper, we experiment with an array of centrality measures on word and noun phrase collocation networks, and analyze their performance on four benchmark datasets. Not only are there centrality measures that perform as well as or better than PageRank, but they are much simpler (e.g., degree, strength, and neighborhood size). Furthermore, centrality-based methods give results that are competitive with and, in some cases, better than two strong unsupervised baselines.