Ireland

Social media has become a dangerous place as bullies take advantage of the anonymity the Internet provides to target and intimidate vulnerable individuals and groups. In the past few years, the research community has focused on developing automatic classification tools for detecting hate-speech, its variants, and other types of abusive behaviour. However, these methods are still at an early stage in low-resource languages. With the aim of reducing this barrier, the TamilNLP shared task has proposed a multi-classification challenge for Tamil written in Tamil script and code-mixed to detect abusive comments and hope-speech. Our participation consists of a knowledge integration strategy that combines sentence embeddings from BERT, RoBERTa, FastText and a subset of language-independent linguistic features. We achieved our best result in code-mixed, reaching 3rd position with a macro-average f1-score of 35%.

ACL 2022

Abusive Detection in Tamil using Linguistic Features and Transformers

hope-speech

hate-speech

document classification

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

workshop paper

Social media platforms often act as breeding grounds for various forms of trolling or malicious content targeting users or communities. One way of trolling users is by creating memes, which in most cases unites an image with a short piece of text embedded on top of it. The situation is more complex for multilingual(e.g., Tamil) memes due to the lack of benchmark datasets and models. We explore several models to detect Troll memes in Tamil based on the shared task, "Troll Meme Classification in DravidianLangTech2022" at ACL-2022. We observe while the text-based model MURIL performs better for Non-troll meme classification, the image-based model VGG16 performs better for Troll-meme classification. Further fusing these two modalities help us achieve stable outcomes in both classes. Our fusion model achieved a 0.561 weighted average F1 score and ranked second in this task.

Ensembling Multi-Modalities for Tamil TrollMeme Classification

Using technology for analysis of human emotion is a relatively nascent research area. There are several types of data where emotion recognition can be employed, such as - text, images, audio and video. In this paper, the focus is on emotion recognition in text data. Emotion recognition in text can be performed from both written comments and from conversations. In this paper, the dataset used for emotion recognition is a list of comments. While extensive research is being performed in this area, the language of the text plays a very important role. In this work, the focus is on the Dravidian language of Tamil. The language and its script demands an extensive pre-processing. The paper contributes to this by adapting various pre-processing methods to the Dravidian Language of Tamil. A CNN method has been adopted for the task at hand. The proposed method has achieved a comparable result.

CNN for Emotion Analysis in Tamil

Offensive Span identification in Tamil is a shared task that focuses on identifying harmful content, contributing to offensiveness. In this work, we have built a model that can efficiently identify the span of text contributing to offensive content. We have used various transformer-based models to develop the system, out of which the fine-tuned MuRIL model was able to achieve the best overall character F1-score of 0.4489.

Transformer based model for Toxic Span Identification in Tamil

The spread of fake news, propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and harmful content online raised concerns among social media platforms, government agencies, policymakers, and society as a whole. This is because such harmful or abusive content leads to several consequences to people such as physical, emotional, relational, and financial. Among different harmful content \textit{trolling-based} online content is one of them, where the idea is to post a message that is provocative, offensive, or menacing with an intent to mislead the audience. The content can be textual, visual, a combination of both, or a meme. In this study, we provide a comparative analysis of troll-based memes classification using the textual, visual, and multimodal content. We report several interesting findings in terms of code-mixed text, multimodal setting, and combining an additional dataset, which shows improvements over the majority baseline.

A Comparative Analysis for Troll-Based Meme Classification

This paper describes the systems built by our team for the “Emotion Analysis in Tamil” shared task at the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages at ACL 2022. There were two multi-class classification sub-tasks as a part of this shared task. The dataset for sub-task A contained 11 types of emotions while sub-task B was more fine-grained with 31 emotions. We fine-tuned an XLM-RoBERTa and DeBERTA base model for each sub-task. For sub-task A, the XLM-RoBERTa model achieved an accuracy of 0.46 and the DeBERTa model achieved an accuracy of 0.45. We had the best classification performance out of 11 teams for sub-task A. For sub-task B, the XLM-RoBERTa model's accuracy was 0.33 and the DeBERTa model had an accuracy of 0.26. We ranked 2nd out of 7 teams for sub-task B.

Emotion Analysis and Classification in Tamil using Transformers

This paper presents transformer-based models for the "Abusive Comment Detection" shared task at the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages at ACL 2022. Our team participated in both the multi-class classification sub-tasks as a part of this shared task. The dataset for sub-task A was in Tamil text; while B was code-mixed Tamil-English text. Both the datasets contained 8 classes of abusive comments. We trained an XLM-RoBERTa and DeBERTA base model on the training splits for each sub-task. For sub-task A, the XLM-RoBERTa model achieved an accuracy of 0.66 and the DeBERTa model achieved an accuracy of 0.62. For sub-task B, both the models achieved a classification accuracy of 0.72; however, the DeBERTa model performed better in other classification metrics. Our team ranked 2nd in the code-mixed classification sub-task and 8th in Tamil-text sub-task.

Using Transformers for Abusive Comment Classification in Tamil

Identifying abusive content or hate speech in social media text has raised the research community's interest in recent times. The major driving force behind this is the widespread use of social media websites. Further, it also leads to identifying abusive content in low-resource regional languages, which is an important research problem in computational linguistics. As part of ACL-2022, organizers of DravidianLangTech@ACL 2022 have released a shared task on abusive category identification in Tamil and Tamil-English code-mixed text to encourage further research on offensive content identification in low-resource Indic languages. This paper presents the working notes for the model submitted by IIITDWD at DravidianLangTech@ACL 2022. Our team competed in Sub-Task B and finished in 9$^{th}$ place among the participating teams. In our proposed approach, we used a pre-trained transformer model such as Indic-bert for feature extraction, and on top of that, SVM classifier is used for stance detection. Further, our model achieved 62 % accuracy on code-mixed Tamil-English text.

Transformer-based approach to classify abusive content in Dravidian Code-mixed text

As the world around us continues to become increasingly digital, it has been acknowledged that there is a growing need for emotion analysis of social media content. The task of identifying the emotion in a given text has many practical applications ranging from screening public health to business and management. In this paper, we propose a language-agnostic model that focuses on emotion analysis in Tamil text. Our experiments yielded an F1 score of 0.010.

Emotion Analysis in Tamil Text using Language Agnostic Embeddings

Abusive language has lately been prevalent in comments on various social media platforms. The increasing hostility observed on the internet calls for the creation of a system that can identify and flag such acerbic content, to prevent conflict and mental distress. This task becomes more challenging when low-resource languages like Tamil, as well as the oftenobserved Tamil-English code-mixed text, are involved. The approach used in this paper for the classification model includes different methods of feature extraction and the use of traditional classifiers. We propose a novel method of combining language-agnostic sentence embeddings with the TF-IDF vector representation that uses a curated corpus of words as vocabulary, to create a custom embedding, which is then passed to an SVM classifier. Our experimentation yielded an accuracy of 52% and a macro F1-score of 0.54.

Mixed Data Using Custom Embeddings with LaBSE

This is a presentation by the team Translation Techies for the DravidianLangTech workshop in ACL 2022. We have aimed to build a model for translating the Dravidian Languages using Neural Machine Translator. We have used the OpenNMT framework which is based on the Transformer architecture. The results we obtained were fairly well and can be improved by using more pre-processing techniques.

Abusive Detection in Tamil using Linguistic Features and Transformers

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Next from ACL 2022

Ensembling Multi-Modalities for Tamil TrollMeme Classification

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