Thailand

In SemEval-2021 Task-5 Toxic Spans Detection, the focus is on detecting toxic spans within English passages.

Our contributions in our paper:
- Performance Analysis of BERT-based models on Token Classification and Span-Prediction approaches.
- Hybrid Approaches: Multi-Span, Span+Token, LSTM-CRF, and Union/Intersection.
- A thorough ablative analysis and analysis/interpretation of our observed results. 

Our best submission is a combination of SpanBERT Span Predictor and RoBERTa Token Classifier predictions - achieves an F₁ score of 0.6753 on the test set. 
Our best post-eval F₁ score is 0.6895 on intersection of predicted offsets from top-3 RoBERTa Token Classification checkpoints.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Toxic Spans Detection Leveraging BERT-based Token Classification and Span Prediction Techniques

span prediction

toxic spans

token classification

lstm

bert

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

workshop paper

A dialogue is essentially a multi-turn interaction among interlocutors. Effective evaluation metrics should reflect the dynamics of such interaction. Existing automatic metrics are focused very much on the turn-level quality, while ignoring such dynamics. To this end, we propose DynaEval, a unified automatic evaluation framework which is not only capable of performing turn-level evaluation, but also holistically considers the quality of the entire dialogue. In DynaEval, the graph convolutional network (GCN) is adopted to model a dialogue in totality, where the graph nodes denote each individual utterance and the edges represent the dependency between pairs of utterances. A contrastive loss is then applied to distinguish well-formed dialogues from carefully constructed negative samples. Experiments show that DynaEval significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art dialogue coherence model, and correlates strongly with human judgements across multiple dialogue evaluation aspects at both turn and dialogue level.

DynaEval: Unifying Turn and Dialogue Level Evaluation

Task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems often need to formulate knowledge base (KB) queries corresponding to the user intent and use the query results to generate system responses. Existing approaches require dialog datasets to explicitly annotate these KB queries -- these annotations can be time consuming, and expensive. In response, we define the novel problems of predicting the KB query and training the dialog agent, without explicit KB query annotation. For query prediction, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) baseline, which rewards the generation of those queries whose KB results cover the entities mentioned in subsequent dialog. Further analysis reveals that correlation among query attributes in KB can significantly confuse memory augmented policy optimization (MAPO), an existing state of the art RL agent. To address this, we improve the MAPO baseline with simple but important modifications suited to our task.

To train the full TOD system for our setting, we propose a pipelined approach: it independently predicts when to make a KB query (query position predictor), then predicts a KB query at the predicted position (query predictor), and uses the results of predicted query in subsequent dialog (next response predictor). Overall, our work proposes first solutions to our novel problem, and our analysis highlights the research challenges in training TOD systems without query annotation.

Unsupervised Learning of KB Queries in Task-Oriented Dialogs

Reducing and counter-acting hate speech on Social Media is a significant concern. Most of the proposed automatic methods are conducted exclusively on English and very few consistently labeled, non-English resources have been proposed.
Learning to detect hate speech on English and transferring to unseen languages seems an immediate solution. This work is the first to shed light on the limits of this zero-shot, cross-lingual transfer learning framework for hate speech detection. We use benchmark data sets in English, Italian, and Spanish to detect hate speech towards immigrants and women.
Investigating post-hoc explanations of the model, we discover that non-hateful, language-specific taboo interjections are misinterpreted as signals of hate speech.
Our findings demonstrate that zero-shot, cross-lingual models cannot be used as they are, but need to be carefully designed.

Exposing the limits of Zero-shot Cross-lingual Hate Speech Detection

Finding codes given natural language query is beneficial to the productivity of software developers. Future progress towards better semantic matching between query and code requires richer supervised training resources. To remedy this, we introduce CoSQA dataset. It includes 20,604 labels for pairs of natural language queries and codes, each annotated by at least 3 human annotators. We further introduce a contrastive learning method dubbed CoCLR to enhance text-code matching, which works as a data augmenter to bring more artificially generated training instances. We show that, evaluated on CodeXGLUE with the same CodeBERT model, training on CoSQA improves the accuracy of code question answering by 5.1% and incorporating CoCLR brings a further improvement of 10.5%.

CoSQA: 20,000+ Web Queries for Code Search and Question Answering

QED: A Framework and Dataset for Explanations in Question Answering

Increasing studies leverage pre-trained language models and meta-learning frameworks to solve few-shot text classification problems. Most of the current studies focus on building a meta-learner from the information of input texts but ignore abundant semantic information beneath class labels. In this work, we show that class-label information can be utilized for extracting more discriminative feature representation of the input text from a pretrained language model like BERT, and can achieve a performance boost when the samples are scarce. Building on top of this discovery, we propose a framework called Labelsemantic augmented meta-learner (LaSAML) to make full use of label semantics. We systematically investigate various factors in this framework and show that it can be plugged into the existing few-shot text classification system. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the few-shot text classification system upgraded by LaSAML can lead to significant performance improvement over its original counterparts.

Don’t Miss the Labels: Label-semantic Augmented Meta-Learner for Few-Shot Text Classification

In this work, we present our approach and findings for SemEval-2021 Task 5 - Toxic Spans Detection. The task’s main aim was to identify spans to which a given text’s toxicity could be attributed. The task is challenging mainly due to two constraints: the small training dataset and imbalanced class distribution. Our paper investigates two techniques, semi-supervised learning and learning with Self-Adjusting Dice Loss, for tackling these challenges. Our submitted system (ranked ninth on the leaderboard) consisted of an ensemble of various pre-trained Transformer Language Models trained using either of the above-proposed techniques.


IITK@Detox at SemEval-2021 Task 5: Semi-Supervised Learning and Dice Loss for Toxic Spans Detection

With the ever-increasing availability of digital information, toxic content is also on the rise. Therefore, the detection of this type of language is of paramount importance. We tackle this problem utilizing a combination of a state-of-the-art pre-trained language model (CharacterBERT) and a traditional bag-of-words technique. Since the content is full of toxic words that have not been written according to their dictionary spelling, attendance to individual characters is crucial. Therefore, we use CharacterBERT to extract features based on the word characters. It consists of a CharacterCNN module that learns character embeddings from the context. These are, then, fed into the well-known BERT architecture. The bag-of-words method, on the other hand, further improves upon that by making sure that some frequently used toxic words get labeled accordingly.



UniParma at SemEval-2021 Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection Using CharacterBERT and Bag-of-Words Model

The real-world impact of polarization and toxicity in the online sphere marked the end of 2020 and the beginning of this year in a negative way. Semeval-2021, Task 5 - Toxic Spans Detection is based on a novel annotation of a subset of the Jigsaw Unintended Bias dataset and is the first language toxicity detection task dedicated to identifying the toxicity-level spans. For this task, participants had to automatically detect character spans in short comments that render the message as toxic. Our model considers applying Virtual Adversarial Training in a semi-supervised setting during the fine-tuning process of several Transformer-based models (i.e., BERT and RoBERTa), in combination with Conditional Random Fields. Our approach leads to performance improvements and more robust models, enabling us to achieve an F1-score of 65.73% in the official submission and an F1-score of 66.13% after further tuning during post-evaluation.

UPB at SemEval-2021 Task 5: Virtual Adversarial Training for Toxic Spans Detection

This paper presents a system used for SemEval-2021 Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection. Our system is an ensemble of BERT-based models for binary word classification, trained on a dataset extended by toxic comments modified and generated by two language models. For the toxic word classification, the prediction threshold value was optimized separately for every comment, in order to maximize the
expected F1 value.

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Toxic Spans Detection Leveraging BERT-based Token Classification and Span Prediction Techniques

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