Nowadays, memes are considered one of the most prominent forms of medium to disseminate information on social media. Memes are typically constructed in multilingual settings using visuals with texts. Sometimes people use memes to influence mass audiences through rhetorical and psychological techniques, such as causal oversimplification, name-calling, and smear. It is a challenging task to identify those techniques considering memes’ multimodal characteristics. To address these challenges, SemEval-2024 Task 4 introduced a shared task focusing on detecting persuasion techniques in multilingual memes. This paper presents our participation in subtasks 1 and 2 (b). We use a finetuned language-agnostic BERT sentence embedding (LaBSE) model to extract effective contextual features from meme text to address the challenge of identifying persuasion techniques in subtask 1. For subtask 2 (b), We finetune the vision transformer and XLM-RoBERTa to extract effective contextual information from meme image and text data. Finally, we unify those features and employ a single feed-forward linear layer on top to obtain the prediction label. Experimental results on the SemEval 2024 Task 4 benchmark dataset manifested the potency of our proposed methods for subtasks 1 and 2 (b).

Multi Criteria Decision Making", also known as MCDM", is a means of finding out solutions to numerous complex problems. It is generally used for solving issues that has numerous choices to make and one optimum decision to make among the alternatives. In this research paper, AHP-TOPSIS, ANP(Analytic network process) has been used as "MCDM" procedures for finding out the most suitable candidates for the interview panel in an organization. Weights obtained in AHP was used in TOPSIS for maintaining the optimality of the AHP-TOPSIS procedure. Moreover, ANP was used as there was dependency among the criteria. Finally, DEMATEL was used to evaluate the results obtained in MCDM procedures and finding out the optimum approach for selecting the candidate within an organization.

Twitter is deemed the most reliable and convenient microblogging platform for getting real-time news and information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people are keen to share various information ranging from new cases, healthcare guidelines, medication, and vaccine news on Twitter. However, a major portion of the shared tweets is uninformative and misleading which may create mass panic. Hence, it is an important task to distinguish and label a COVID-19 tweet as informative or uninformative. Prior works mostly focused on various pretrained transformer models and different types of contextual feature extractors to address this task. However, most of the works applied these models one at a time and didn't employ any effective neural layer at the bottom to distill the tweet contexts effectively. Since a tweet may contain a multifarious context, therefore, representing a tweet using only one kind of feature extractor may not work well. To overcome this limitation, we present an approach that leverages an ensemble of various cutting-edge transformer models to capture the diverse contextual dimension of the tweets. We exploit the BERT, CTBERT, BERTweet, RoBERTa, and XLM-RoBERTa models in our proposed method. Next, we perform a pooling operation on those extracted embedding features to transform them into document embedding vectors. Then, we utilize a feed-forward neural architecture with a linear activation function for the classification task. To generate final prediction, we utilize the majority voting-driven ensemble technique. Experiments on WNUT-2020 COVID-19 English Tweet dataset manifested the efficacy of our method over other state-of-the-art methods.

Microblogging platforms especially Twitter is considered as one of the prominent medium of getting user-generated information. Millions of tweets were posted daily during COVID-19 pandemic days and the rate increases gradually. Tweets include a wide range of information including healthcare information, recent cases, and vaccination updates. This information helps individuals stay informed about the situation and assists safety personnel in making decisions. Apart from these, large amounts of propaganda and misinformation have spread on Twitter during this period. The impact of this infodemic is multifarious. Therefore, it is considered a formidable task to determine whether a tweet related to COVID-19 is informative or uninformative. However, the noisy and nonformal nature of tweets makes it difficult to determine the tweets’ informativeness. In this paper, we propose an approach that exploits the benefits of finetuned transformer models for informative tweet identification. Upon extracting features from pre-trained COVID-Twitter-BERT and RoBERTa models, we leverage the stacked embedding technique to combine them. The features are then fed to a BiLSTM module to learn the contextual dimension effectively. Finally, a simple feed-forward linear architecture is employed to obtain the predicted label. Experimental result on WNUT-2020 benchmark informative tweet detection dataset demonstrates the potency of our method over various state-of-the-art approaches.