Malta

Our work addresses the growing concern of abusive comments in online platforms, particularly focusing on the identification of Homophobia and Transphobia in social media comments. The goal is to categorize comments into three classes: Homophobia, Transphobia, and non-anti LGBT+ comments. Utilizing machine learning techniques and a deep learning model, our work involves training on a English dataset with a designated training set and testing on a validation set. This approach aims to contribute to the understanding and detection of Homophobia and Transphobia within the realm of social media interactions.In the era of digital communication, social media platforms play a crucial role in facilitating interactions, education, and information exchange. YouTube, a prominent social networking and video-sharing platform, allows users to create accounts, share videos, and engage with their audience through comments. Unfortunately, the presence of abusive comments on videos or responses to other users&#39; comments can be offensive and detrimental to the mental well-being of platform users, especially when it comes to transgender and homo-sexual people.The surge in online communication has brought forth concerns regarding the dissemination of slander, hate speech, and online bullying. Slander, defined as a false spoken statement damaging to a person or group, is increasingly recognized for its harmful impact on individuals and society. Negative comments not only inflict psychological harm but also contribute to the spread of humor, division, and discontent online. Recognizing the profound consequences of hate speech, major platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have instituted policies and protocols to address hateful content and counteract negative behaviors. The objective of our study is to analyze and pinpoint offensive comments within an English dataset. English, known for its analytical or isolating nature, conveys grammatical relationships through word order and auxiliary words rather than extensive affixation. The task of detecting abusive comments is treated as a text classification problem, involving the extraction of features from the text and assigning it to predefined categories. This is achieved through a linear classifier operating on sentence embeddings. We conducted training on a variety of machine learning and deep learning models to identify abusive comments in English, and the results were compared to determine the optimal model.

EACL 2024

KEC-AI-NLP@LT-EDI-2024:Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in social media comments using Machine Learning

cyber-abuse

social-media

transphobia

homophobia

hate-speech

comments

detection

# 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. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

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). 

Our work addresses the growing concern of abusive comments in online platforms, particularly focusing on the identification of Homophobia and Transphobia in social media comments. The goal is to categorize comments into three classes: Homophobia, Transphobia, and non-anti LGBT+ comments. Utilizing machine learning techniques and a deep learning model, our work involves training on a English dataset with a designated training set and testing on a validation set. This approach aims to contribute to the understanding and detection of Homophobia and Transphobia within the realm of social media interactions.In the era of digital communication, social media platforms play a crucial role in facilitating interactions, education, and information exchange. YouTube, a prominent social networking and video-sharing platform, allows users to create accounts, share videos, and engage with their audience through comments. Unfortunately, the presence of abusive comments on videos or responses to other users' comments can be offensive and detrimental to the mental well-being of platform users, especially when it comes to transgender and homo-sexual people.The surge in online communication has brought forth concerns regarding the dissemination of slander, hate speech, and online bullying. Slander, defined as a false spoken statement damaging to a person or group, is increasingly recognized for its harmful impact on individuals and society. Negative comments not only inflict psychological harm but also contribute to the spread of humor, division, and discontent online. Recognizing the profound consequences of hate speech, major platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have instituted policies and protocols to address hateful content and counteract negative behaviors. The objective of our study is to analyze and pinpoint offensive comments within an English dataset. English, known for its analytical or isolating nature, conveys grammatical relationships through word order and auxiliary words rather than extensive affixation. The task of detecting abusive comments is treated as a text classification problem, involving the extraction of features from the text and assigning it to predefined categories. This is achieved through a linear classifier operating on sentence embeddings. We conducted training on a variety of machine learning and deep learning models to identify abusive comments in English, and the results were compared to determine the optimal model.

workshop paper

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

Please register!

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

This study investigates the robustness and generalization of transformer-based models for automatic media bias detection. We explore the behavior of current bias classifiers by analyzing feature attributions and stress-testing with adversarial datasets. The findings reveal a disproportionate focus on rare but strongly connotated words, suggesting a rather superficial understanding of linguistic bias and challenges in contextual interpretation. This problem is further highlighted by inconsistent bias assessment when stress-tested with different entities and minorities. Enhancing automatic media bias detection models is critical to improving inclusivity in media, ensuring balanced and fair representation of diverse perspectives.

Beyond the Surface: Spurious Cues in Automatic Media Bias Detection

As a large how-to website, wikiHow's mission is to empower every person on the planet to learn how to do anything. An important part of including everyone also linguistically is the use of gender-neutral language. In this short paper, we study in how far articles from wikiHow fulfill this criterion based on manual annotation and automatic classification. In particular, we employ a classifier to analyze how the use of gender-neutral language has developed over time. Our results show that although about 75% of all articles on wikiHow were written in a gender-neutral way from the outset, revisions have a higher tendency to add gender-specific language than to change it to inclusive wording.

A Diachronic Analysis of Gender-Neutral Language on wikiHow

Natural Language Processing techniques have been developed to assist in simplifying online content while preserving meaning. However, for low-resource languages, like Maltese, there are still numerous challenges and limitations. Lexical Simplification (LS) is a core technique typically adopted to improve content accessibility, and has been widely studied for high-resource languages such as English and French. Motivated by the need to improve access to Maltese content and the limitations in this context, this work set out to develop and evaluate an LS system for Maltese text. An LS pipeline was developed consisting of (1) potential complex word identification, (2) substitute generation, (3) substitute selection, and (4) substitute ranking. An evaluation data set was developed to assess the performance of each step. Results are encouraging and will lead to numerous future work. Finally, a single-blind study was carried out with over 200 participants, where the system's perceived quality in text simplification was evaluated. Results suggest that meaning is retained about 50% of the time, and when meaning is retained, about 70% of system-generated sentences are either perceived as simpler or of equal simplicity to the original. Challenges remain, and this study proposes a number of areas that may benefit from further research.

Towards Content Accessibility Through Lexical Simplification for Maltese as a Low-Resource Language

We introduce HATELEXICON, a lexicon of slurs and targets of hate speech for Brazil, Germany, India and Kenya, to aid model development and interpretability. First, we demonstrate how HATELEXICON can be used to interpret model predictions, showing that models developed to classify extreme speech rely heavily on target group names. Further, we propose a culturally-informed method to aid shot selection for training in low-resource settings. In few-shot learning, shot selection is of paramount importance to model performance and we need to ensure we make the most of available data. We work with HASOC German and Hindi data for training and the Multilingual HateCheck (MHC) benchmark for evaluation. We show that selecting shots based on our lexicon leads to models performing better than models trained on shots sampled randomly. Thus, when given only a few training examples, using HATELEXICON to select shots containing more sociocultural information leads to better few-shot performance. With these two use-cases we show how our HATELEXICON can be used for more effective hate speech detection.

Sociocultural knowledge is needed for selection of shots in hate speech detection tasks

Large Language models (LLMs), while powerful, exhibit harmful social biases. Debiasing is often challenging due to computational costs, data constraints, and potential degradation of multi-task language capabilities. This work introduces a novel approach utilizing ChatGPT to generate synthetic training data, aiming to enhance the debiasing of LLMs. We propose two strategies: Targeted Prompting, which provides effective debiasing for known biases but necessitates prior specification of bias in question; and General Prompting, which, while slightly less effective, offers debiasing across various categories. We leverage resource-efficient LLM debiasing using adapter tuning and compare the effectiveness of our synthetic data to existing debiasing datasets. Our results reveal that: (1) ChatGPT can efficiently produce high-quality training data for debiasing other LLMs; (2) data produced via our approach surpasses existing datasets in debiasing performance while also preserving internal knowledge of a pre-trained LLM; and (3) synthetic data exhibits generalizability across categories, effectively mitigating various biases, including intersectional ones. These findings underscore the potential of synthetic data in advancing the fairness of LLMs with minimal retraining cost.

ChatGPT Based Data Augmentation for Improved Parameter-Efficient Debiasing of LLMs

This study pioneers the use of synthetically generated data for training generative models in document-level text simplification of German texts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with real-world online texts. Addressing the challenge of data scarcity in language simplification, we crawled professionally simplified German texts and synthesized a corpus using GPT-4. We finetune Large Language Models with up to 13 billion parameters on this data and evaluate their performance. This paper employs various methodologies for evaluation and demonstrates the limitations of currently used rule-based metrics. Both automatic and manual evaluations reveal that our models can significantly simplify real-world online texts, indicating the potential of synthetic data in improving text simplification.

German Text Simplification: Finetuning Large Language Models with Semi-Synthetic Data

Commonly used language defines ”hate speech” as objectionable statements that may jeopardize societal harmony by singling out a group or a person based on fundamental traits (includ- ing gender, caste, or religion). Using machine learning techniques, our research focuses on identifying hate speech in social media com- ments. Using a variety of machine learning methods, we created machine learning models to detect hate speech. An approximate F1 of 0.6 was attained by the created models.

KEC AI DSNLP@LT-EDI-2024:Caste/Immigration Hate Speech Detection using Machine Learning Techniques

Dehumanization is a mental process that enables the exclusion and ill treatment of a group of people. In this paper, we present two data sets of dehumanizing text, a large, automatically collected corpus and a smaller, manually annotated data set. Both data sets include a combination of political discourse and dialogue from movie subtitles. Our methods give us a broad and varied amount of dehumanization data to work with, enabling further exploratory analysis as well as automatic classification of dehumanization patterns. Both data sets will be publicly released.

A Dataset for the Detection of Dehumanizing Language

In the field of spoken language understanding, systems like Whisper and Multilingual Massive Speech (MMS) have shown state-of-the-art performances. This study is dedicated to a comprehensive exploration of the Whisper and MMS systems, with a focus on assessing biases in automatic speech recognition (ASR) inherent to casual conversation speech specific to the Portuguese language. Our investigation encompasses various categories, including gender, age, skin tone color, and geo-location. Alongside traditional ASR evaluation metrics such as Word Error Rate (WER), we have incorporated p-value statistical significance for gender bias analysis. Furthermore, we extensively examine the impact of data distribution and empirically show that oversampling techniques alleviate such stereotypical biases. This research represents a pioneering effort in quantifying biases in the Portuguese language context through the application of MMS and Whisper, contributing to a better understanding of ASR systems' performance in multilingual settings.

The balancing Act: Unmasking and Alleviating ASR Biases in Portuguese

In this paper, we report on a new corpus of simplified German. It is recently requested from public agencies in Germany to provide information in easy language on their outlets (e.g. websites) so as to facilitate participation in society for people with low-literacy levels related to learning difficulties or low language proficiency (e.g. L2 speakers). While various rule sets and guidelines for Easy German (a specific variant of simplified German) have emerged over time, it is unclear (a) to what extent authors and other content creators, including generative AI tools consistently apply them, and (b) how adequate texts in authentic Easy German really are for the intended audiences. As a first step in gaining insights into these issues and to further LT development for simplified German, we compiled DE-Lite, a corpus of easy-to-read texts including Easy German and comparable Standard German texts, by integrating existing collections and gathering new data from the web. We built n-gram models for an Easy German subcorpus of DE-Lite and comparable Standard German texts in order to identify typical features of Easy German. To this end, we use relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler Divergence), a standard technique for evaluating language models, which we apply here for corpus comparison. Our analysis reveals that some rules of Easy German are fairly dominant (e.g. punctuation) and that text genre has a strong effect on the distinctivity of the two language variants.

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Next from EACL 2024

Beyond the Surface: Spurious Cues in Automatic Media Bias Detection

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Ensemble Modeling for Homophobia and Transphobia Detection