This paper describes the structure and findings of the WILDRE 2024 shared task on Code-mixed Less-resourced Sentiment Analysis for Indo-Aryan Languages. The participants were asked to submit the test data’s final prediction on CodaLab. A total of fourteen teams registered for the shared task. Only four participants submitted the system for evaluation on CodaLab, with only two teams submitting the system description paper. While all systems show a rather promising performance, they outperform the baseline scores.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis ( ABSA) aims to identify terms or multiword expressions (MWEs) on which sentiments are expressed and the sentiment polarities associated with them. The development of supervised models has been at the forefront of research in this area. However, training these models requires the availability of manually annotated datasets which is both expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, the available annotated datasets are tailored to a specific domain, language, and text type. In this work, we address this notable challenge in current state-of-the-art ABSA research. We propose a hybrid approach for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis using transfer learning. The approach focuses on generating weakly-supervised annotations by exploiting the strengths of both large language models (LLM) and traditional syntactic dependencies. We utilise syntactic dependency structures of sentences to complement the annotations generated by LLMs, as they may overlook domain-specific aspect terms. Extensive experimentation on multiple datasets is performed to demonstrate the efficacy of our hybrid method for the tasks of aspect term extraction and aspect sentiment classification.

The present paper introduces new sentiment data, MaCMS, for Magahi-Hindi-English (MHE) code-mixed language, where Magahi is a less-resourced minority language. This dataset is the first Magahi-Hindi-English code-mixed dataset for sentiment analysis tasks. Further, we also provide a linguistics analysis of the dataset to understand the structure of code-mixing and a statistical study to understand the language preferences of speakers with different polarities. With these analyses, we also train baseline models to evaluate the dataset’s quality.

There has been notable progress in the development of open-domain dialogue systems (chatbots) especially with the rapid advancement of the capabilities of Large Language Models. Chatbots excel at holding conversations in a manner that keeps a user interested and engaged. However, their responses can be unsafe, as they can respond in an offensive manner or offer harmful professional advice. As a way to mitigate this issue, recent work crowdsource datasets with exemplary responses or annotate dialogue safety datasets, which are relatively scarce compared to casual dialogues. Despite the quality of data obtained from crowdsourcing, it can be expensive and time consuming. This work proposes an effective pipeline, using information retrieval, to automatically repurpose existing dialogue datasets for safe chatbot development, as a way to address the aforementioned challenges. We select an existing dialogue dataset, revise its unsafe responses, as a way to obtain a dataset with safer responses to unsafe user inputs. We then fine-tune dialogue models on the original and revised datasets and generate responses to evaluate the safeness of the models.