AlexU-BackTranslation-TL at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Improving Offensive Language Detection Using Data Augmentation and Transfer Learning

Mai Ibrahim, Marwan Torki, Nagwa El-Makky


Abstract
Social media platforms, online news commenting spaces, and many other public forums have become widely known for issues of abusive behavior such as cyber-bullying and personal attacks. In this paper, we use the annotated tweets of the Offensive Language Identification Dataset (OLID) to train three levels of deep learning classifiers to solve the three sub-tasks associated with the dataset. Sub-task A is to determine if the tweet is toxic or not. Then, for offensive tweets, sub-task B requires determining whether the toxicity is targeted. Finally, for sub-task C, we predict the target of the offense; i.e. a group, individual, or other entity. In our solution, we tackle the problem of class imbalance in the dataset by using back translation for data augmentation and utilizing the fine-tuned BERT model in an ensemble of deep learning classifiers. We used this solution to participate in the three English sub-tasks of SemEval-2020 task 12. The proposed solution achieved 0.91393, 0.6300, and 0.57607 macro F1-average in sub-tasks A, B, and C respectively. We achieved the 9th, 14th, and 22nd places for sub-tasks A, B and C respectively.
Anthology ID:
2020.semeval-1.248
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona (online)
Editors:
Aurelie Herbelot, Xiaodan Zhu, Alexis Palmer, Nathan Schneider, Jonathan May, Ekaterina Shutova
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
International Committee for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1881–1890
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.248
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.semeval-1.248
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mai Ibrahim, Marwan Torki, and Nagwa El-Makky. 2020. AlexU-BackTranslation-TL at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Improving Offensive Language Detection Using Data Augmentation and Transfer Learning. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 1881–1890, Barcelona (online). International Committee for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AlexU-BackTranslation-TL at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Improving Offensive Language Detection Using Data Augmentation and Transfer Learning (Ibrahim et al., SemEval 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.248.pdf
Data
OLID