In this paper we present our approach and the system description for Sub-task A and Sub Task B of SemEval 2019 Task 6: Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media. Sub-task A involves identifying if a given tweet is offensive or not, and Sub Task B involves detecting if an offensive tweet is targeted towards someone (group or an individual). Our models for Sub-task A is based on an ensemble of Convolutional Neural Network, Bidirectional LSTM with attention, and Bidirectional LSTM + Bidirectional GRU, whereas for Sub-task B, we rely on a set of heuristics derived from the training data and manual observation. We provide detailed analysis of the results obtained using the trained models. Our team ranked 5th out of 103 participants in Sub-task A, achieving a macro F1 score of 0.807, and ranked 8th out of 75 participants in Sub Task B achieving a macro F1 of 0.695.
This document describes our approach to building an Offensive Language Classifier. More specifically, the OffensEval 2019 competition required us to build three classifiers with slightly different goals: - Offensive language identification: would classify a tweet as offensive or not. - Automatic categorization of offense types: would recognize if the target of the offense was an individual or not. - Offense target identification: would identify the target of the offense between an individual, group or other. In this report, we will discuss the different architectures, algorithms and pre-proces…
University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）；Amazon Research（亚马逊研究院）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Bhim Rao Ambedkar University（比姆·拉奥·安贝德卡尔大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2019 Task 6 on Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media (OffensEval). The task was based on a new dataset, the Offensive Language Identification Dataset (OLID), which contains over 14,000 English tweets. It featured three sub-tasks. In sub-task A, the goal was to discriminate between offensive and non-offensive posts. In sub-task B, the focus was on the type of offensive content in the post. Finally, in sub-task C, systems had to detect the target of the offensive posts. OffensEval attracted a large number of partic…
SemEval-2020 Task 12 was OffenseEval: Multilingual Offensive Language Identification in Social Media (Zampieri et al., 2020). The task was subdivided into multiple languages and datasets were provided for each one. The task was further divided into three sub-tasks: offensive language identification, automatic categorization of offense types, and offense target identification. I have participated in the task-C, that is, offense target identification. For preparing the proposed system, I have made use of Deep Learning networks like LSTMs and frameworks like Keras which combine the bag of words m…
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur)（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
Humor and Offense are highly subjective due to multiple word senses, cultural knowledge, and pragmatic competence. Hence, accurately detecting humorous and offensive texts has several compelling use cases in Recommendation Systems and Personalized Content Moderation. However, due to the lack of an extensive labeled dataset, most prior works in this domain haven't explored large neural models for subjective humor understanding. This paper explores whether large neural models and their ensembles can capture the intricacies associated with humor/offense detection and rating. Our experiments on th…
This paper describes the Duluth systems that participated in SemEval--2019 Task 6, Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media (OffensEval). For the most part these systems took traditional Machine Learning approaches that built classifiers from lexical features found in manually labeled training data. However, our most successful system for classifying a tweet as offensive (or not) was a rule-based black--list approach, and we also experimented with combining the training data from two different but related SemEval tasks. Our best systems in each of the three OffensEval ta…
This short paper presents the design decisions taken and challenges encountered in completing SemEval Task 6, which poses the problem of identifying and categorizing offensive language in tweets. Our proposed solutions explore Deep Learning techniques, Linear Support Vector classification and Random Forests to identify offensive tweets, to classify offenses as targeted or untargeted and eventually to identify the target subject type.
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 after careful sampling and annotation of offensive content, there will always exist a significant class imbalance between offensive and non-offensive content. In this paper, we introduce a novel Code-Mixing Index (CMI) based focal…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所，哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
Detecting offensive language on Twitter has many applications ranging from detecting/predicting bullying to measuring polarization. In this paper, we focus on building a large Arabic offensive tweet dataset. We introduce a method for building a dataset that is not biased by topic, dialect, or target. We produce the largest Arabic dataset to date with special tags for vulgarity and hate speech. We thoroughly analyze the dataset to determine which topics, dialects, and gender are most associated with offensive tweets and how Arabic speakers use offensive language. Lastly, we conduct many experim…
Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune（浦那马哈拉施特拉理工学院）
Toxic online content has become a major issue in today's world due to an exponential increase in the use of internet by people of different cultures and educational background. Differentiating hate speech and offensive language is a key challenge in automatic detection of toxic text content. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically classify tweets on Twitter into three classes: hateful, offensive and clean. Using Twitter dataset, we perform experiments considering n-grams as features and passing their term frequency-inverse document frequency (TFIDF) values to multiple machine le…
We investigate different strategies for automatic offensive language classification on German Twitter data. For this, we employ a sequentially combined BiLSTM-CNN neural network. Based on this model, three transfer learning tasks to improve the classification performance with background knowledge are tested. We compare 1. Supervised category transfer: social media data annotated with near-offensive language categories, 2. Weakly-supervised category transfer: tweets annotated with emojis they contain, 3. Unsupervised category transfer: tweets annotated with topic clusters obtained by Latent Dir…
Pune Institute of Computer Technology（浦那计算机技术学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Automated offensive language detection is essential in combating the spread of hate speech, particularly in social media. This paper describes our work on Offensive Language Identification in low resource Indic language Marathi. The problem is formulated as a text classification task to identify a tweet as offensive or non-offensive. We evaluate different mono-lingual and multi-lingual BERT models on this classification task, focusing on BERT models pre-trained with social media datasets. We compare the performance of MuRIL, MahaTweetBERT, MahaTweetBERT-Hateful, and MahaBERT on the HASOC 2022 …
Communicating through social platforms has become one of the principal means of personal communications and interactions. Unfortunately, healthy communication is often interfered by offensive language that can have damaging effects on the users. A key to fight offensive language on social media is the existence of an automatic offensive language detection system. This paper presents the results and the main findings of SemEval-2020, Task 12 OffensEval Sub-task A Zampieri et al. (2020), on Identifying and categorising Offensive Language in Social Media. The task was based on the Arabic OffensEv…
This paper describes Galileo's performance in SemEval-2020 Task 12 on detecting and categorizing offensive language in social media. For Offensive Language Identification, we proposed a multi-lingual method using Pre-trained Language Models, ERNIE and XLM-R. For offensive language categorization, we proposed a knowledge distillation method trained on soft labels generated by several supervised models. Our team participated in all three sub-tasks. In Sub-task A - Offensive Language Identification, we ranked first in terms of average F1 scores in all languages. We are also the only team which ra…
Detection of offensive language in social media is one of the key challenges for social media. Researchers have proposed many advanced methods to accomplish this task. In this report, we try to use the learnings from their approach and incorporate our ideas to improve upon them. We have successfully achieved an accuracy of 74% in classifying offensive tweets. We also list upcoming challenges in the abusive content detection in the social media world.
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）
This paper describes the UM-IU@LING's system for the SemEval 2019 Task 6: OffensEval. We take a mixed approach to identify and categorize hate speech in social media. In subtask A, we fine-tuned a BERT based classifier to detect abusive content in tweets, achieving a macro F1 score of 0.8136 on the test data, thus reaching the 3rd rank out of 103 submissions. In subtasks B and C, we used a linear SVM with selected character n-gram features. For subtask C, our system could identify the target of abuse with a macro F1 score of 0.5243, ranking it 27th out of 65 submissions.
Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学机器语言处理研究所）
The 2020 US Elections have been, more than ever before, characterized by social media campaigns and mutual accusations. We investigate in this paper if this manifests also in online communication of the supporters of the candidates Biden and Trump, by uttering hateful and offensive communication. We formulate an annotation task, in which we join the tasks of hateful/offensive speech detection and stance detection, and annotate 3000 Tweets from the campaign period, if they express a particular stance towards a candidate. Next to the established classes of favorable and against, we add mixed and…
In this paper, we describe the PUM team's entry to the SemEval-2020 Task 12. Creating our solution involved leveraging two well-known pretrained models used in natural language processing: BERT and XLNet, which achieve state-of-the-art results in multiple NLP tasks. The models were fine-tuned for each subtask separately and features taken from their hidden layers were combined and fed into a fully connected neural network. The model using aggregated Transformer features can serve as a powerful tool for offensive language identification problem. Our team was ranked 7th out of 40 in Sub-task C -…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
We introduce a generic, language-independent method to collect a large percentage of offensive and hate tweets regardless of their topics or genres. We harness the extralinguistic information embedded in the emojis to collect a large number of offensive tweets. We apply the proposed method on Arabic tweets and compare it with English tweets - analysing key cultural differences. We observed a constant usage of these emojis to represent offensiveness throughout different timespans on Twitter. We manually annotate and publicly release the largest Arabic dataset for offensive, fine-grained hate sp…
Information Retrieval Lab（信息检索实验室）；Georgetown University（乔治城大学）
Offensive language detection is an important and challenging task in natural language processing. We present our submissions to the OffensEval 2020 shared task, which includes three English sub-tasks: identifying the presence of offensive language (Sub-task A), identifying the presence of target in offensive language (Sub-task B), and identifying the categories of the target (Sub-task C). Our experiments explore using a domain-tuned contextualized language model (namely, BERT) for this task. We also experiment with different components and configurations (e.g., a multi-view SVM) stacked upon B…
Detecting humor is a challenging task since words might share multiple valences and, depending on the context, the same words can be even used in offensive expressions. Neural network architectures based on Transformer obtain state-of-the-art results on several Natural Language Processing tasks, especially text classification. Adversarial learning, combined with other techniques such as multi-task learning, aids neural models learn the intrinsic properties of data. In this work, we describe our adversarial multi-task network, AMTL-Humor, used to detect and rate humor and offensive texts from T…
This paper describes the Duluth systems that participated in SemEval--2020 Task 12, Multilingual Offensive Language Identification in Social Media (OffensEval--2020). We participated in the three English language tasks. Our systems provide a simple Machine Learning baseline using logistic regression. We trained our models on the distantly supervised training data made available by the task organizers and used no other resources. As might be expected we did not rank highly in the comparative evaluation: 79th of 85 in Task A, 34th of 43 in Task B, and 24th of 39 in Task C. We carried out a quali…
Offensive language is pervasive in social media. Individuals frequently take advantage of the perceived anonymity of computer-mediated communication, using this to engage in behavior that many of them would not consider in real life. The automatic identification of offensive content online is an important task that has gained more attention in recent years. This task can be modeled as a supervised classification problem in which systems are trained using a dataset containing posts that are annotated with respect to the presence of some form(s) of abusive or offensive content. The objective of …
This report contains the details regarding our submission to the OffensEval 2019 (SemEval 2019 - Task 6). The competition was based on the Offensive Language Identification Dataset. We first discuss the details of the classifier implemented and the type of input data used and pre-processing performed. We then move onto critically evaluating our performance. We have achieved a macro-average F1-score of 0.76, 0.68, 0.54, respectively for Task a, Task b, and Task c, which we believe reflects on the level of sophistication of the models implemented. Finally, we will be discussing the difficulties …
We examine learning offensive content on Twitter with limited, imbalanced data. For the purpose, we investigate the utility of using various data enhancement methods with a host of classical ensemble classifiers. Among the 75 participating teams in SemEval-2019 sub-task B, our system ranks 6th (with 0.706 macro F1-score). For sub-task C, among the 65 participating teams, our system ranks 9th (with 0.587 macro F1-score).
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
Rampant use of offensive language on social media led to recent efforts on automatic identification of such language. Though offensive language has general characteristics, attacks on specific entities may exhibit distinct phenomena such as malicious alterations in the spelling of names. In this paper, we present a method for identifying entity specific offensive language. We employ two key insights, namely that replies on Twitter often imply opposition and some accounts are persistent in their offensiveness towards specific targets. Using our methodology, we are able to collect thousands of t…
Cochin University of Science and Technology（科钦科技大学）
With the popularity of social media, communications through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other plat-forms have increased. Initially, English was the only medium of communication. Fortunately, now we can communicate in any language. It has led to people using English and their own native or mother tongue language in a mixed form. Sometimes, comments in other languages have English transliterated format or other cases; people use the intended language scripts. Identifying sentiments and offensive content from such code mixed tweets is a necessary task in these times. We present a working model …
University of Hildesheim（希尔德斯海姆大学）；University of Antwerp（安特卫普大学）
Discussion about the social network Twitter often concerns its role in political discourse, involving the question of when an expression of opinion becomes offensive, immoral, and/or illegal, and how to deal with it. Given the growing amount of offensive communication on the internet, there is a demand for new technology that can automatically detect hate speech, to assist content moderation by humans. This comes with new challenges, such as defining exactly what is free speech and what is illegal in a specific country, and knowing exactly what the linguistic characteristics of hate speech are…
TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology（莱布尼茨科学技术信息中心（TIB））；Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）
The detection of offensive, hateful and profane language has become a critical challenge since many users in social networks are exposed to cyberbullying activities on a daily basis. In this paper, we present an analysis of combining different textual features for the detection of hateful or offensive posts on Twitter. We provide a detailed experimental evaluation to understand the impact of each building block in a neural network architecture. The proposed architecture is evaluated on the English Subtask 1A: Identifying Hate, offensive and profane content from the post datasets of HASOC-2021 …
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Kalyani（印度信息技术学院卡利亚尼分校）
Social media has seen a worrying rise in hate speech in recent times. Branching to several distinct categories of cyberbullying, gender discrimination, or racism, the combined label for such derogatory content can be classified as toxic content in general. This paper presents experimentation with a Keras wrapped lightweight BERT model to successfully identify hate speech and predict probabilistic impact score for the same to extract the hateful words within sentences. The dataset used for this task is the Hate Speech and Offensive Content Detection (HASOC 2021) data from FIRE 2021 in English. …
SemEval-2019 Task 6 (Zampieri et al., 2019b) requires us to identify and categorise offensive language in social media. In this paper we will describe the process we took to tackle this challenge. Our process is heavily inspired by Sosa (2017) where he proposed CNN-LSTM and LSTM-CNN models to conduct twitter sentiment analysis. We decided to follow his approach as well as further his work by testing out different variations of RNN models with CNN. Specifically, we have divided the challenge into two parts: data processing and sampling and choosing the optimal deep learning architecture. In pre…
Transcending the binary categorization of racist and xenophobic texts, this research takes cues from social science theories to develop a four dimensional category for racism and xenophobia detection, namely stigmatization, offensiveness, blame, and exclusion. With the aid of deep learning techniques, this categorical detection enables insights into the nuances of emergent topics reflected in racist and xenophobic expression on Twitter. Moreover, a stage wise analysis is applied to capture the dynamic changes of the topics across the stages of early development of Covid-19 from a domestic epid…
Online presence on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter has become a daily habit for internet users. Despite the vast amount of services the platforms offer for their users, users suffer from cyber-bullying, which further leads to mental abuse and may escalate to cause physical harm to individuals or targeted groups. In this paper, we present our submission to the Arabic Hate Speech 2022 Shared Task Workshop (OSACT5 2022) using the associated Arabic Twitter dataset. The shared task consists of 3 sub-tasks, sub-task A focuses on detecting whether the tweet is offensive or not. Th…
