Mexico

This report presents gmnlp&#39;s participation to the Dialect-Copa shared task at VarDial 2024~\cite{chifu-etal-2024-vardial}, which focuses on evaluating the commonsense reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on South Slavic micro-dialects. The task aims to assess how well LLMs can handle non-standard dialectal varieties, as their performance on standard languages is already well-established. We propose an approach that combines the strengths of different types of language models and leverages data augmentation techniques to improve task performance on three South Slavic dialects: Chakavian, Cherkano, and Torlak. We conduct experiments using a language-family-focused encoder-based model (BERTić) and a domain-agnostic multilingual model (AYA-101). Our results demonstrate that the proposed data augmentation techniques lead to substantial performance gains across all three test datasets in the open-source model category. This work highlights the practical utility of data augmentation and the potential of LLMs in handling non-standard dialectal varieties, contributing to the broader goal of advancing natural language understanding in low-resource and dialectal settings.

NAACL 2024

Data-Augmentation based Dialectal Adaptation for LLMs

dialectal data augmentation

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

This report presents gmnlp's participation to the Dialect-Copa shared task at VarDial 2024~\cite{chifu-etal-2024-vardial}, which focuses on evaluating the commonsense reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on South Slavic micro-dialects. The task aims to assess how well LLMs can handle non-standard dialectal varieties, as their performance on standard languages is already well-established. We propose an approach that combines the strengths of different types of language models and leverages data augmentation techniques to improve task performance on three South Slavic dialects: Chakavian, Cherkano, and Torlak. We conduct experiments using a language-family-focused encoder-based model (BERTić) and a domain-agnostic multilingual model (AYA-101). Our results demonstrate that the proposed data augmentation techniques lead to substantial performance gains across all three test datasets in the open-source model category. This work highlights the practical utility of data augmentation and the potential of LLMs in handling non-standard dialectal varieties, contributing to the broader goal of advancing natural language understanding in low-resource and dialectal settings.

workshop paper

The paper presents the JSI and W\"{u}NLP systems submitted to the DIALECT-COPA shared task on causal commonsense reasoning in dialectal texts. Jointly, we compare LLM-based zero-shot and few-shot in-context inference (JSI team), and task-specific few-shot fine-tuning, in English and respective standard language, with zero-shot cross-lingual transfer (ZS-XLT) to the test dialects (W\"{u}NLP team). Given the very strong zero-shot and especially few-shot in-context learning (ICL) performance, we further investigate whether task semantics, or language/dialect semantics explain the strong performance, showing that a significant part of the improvement indeed stems from learning the language or dialect semantics from the in-context examples, with only a minor contribution from understanding the nature of the task. The higher importance of the dialect semantics to the task semantics is further shown by the finding that the in-context learning with only a few dialectal instances achieves comparable results to the supervised fine-tuning approach on hundreds of instances in standard language.

JSI and W\"{u}NLP at the DIALECT-COPA Shared Task: In-Context Learning From Just a Few Dialectal Examples Gets You Quite Far

We identify and analyse three sociolinguistic indicators of radicalisation within online extremist forums: hostility, longevity and social connectivity. We develop models to predict the maximum degree of each indicator measured over an individual's lifetime, based on a minimal number of initial interactions. Drawing on data from two diverse extremist communities, our results demonstrate that NLP methods are effective at prioritising at-risk users. This work offers practical insights for intervention strategies and policy development, and highlights an important but under-studied research direction.

Investigating radicalisation indicators in online extremist communities

The automated detection of conspiracy theories online typically relies on supervised learning. However, creating respective training data requires expertise, time and mental resilience, given the often harmful content. Moreover, available datasets are predominantly in English and often keyword-based, introducing a token-level bias into the models. 
Our work addresses the task of detecting conspiracy theories in German Telegram messages. We compare the performance of supervised fine-tuning approaches using BERT-like models with prompt-based approaches using Llama2, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 which require little or no additional training data. We use a dataset of ~4,000 messages collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, without the use of keyword filters.

Our findings demonstrate that both approaches can be leveraged effectively: For supervised fine-tuning, we report an F1 score of $\sim\!\! 0.8$ for the positive class, making our model comparable to recent models trained on keyword-focused English corpora. We demonstrate our model's adaptability to intra-domain temporal shifts, achieving F1 scores of ~0.7. Among prompting variants, the best model is GPT-4, achieving an F1 score of ~0.8 for the positive class in a zero-shot setting and equipped with a custom conspiracy theory definition.

Detection of Conspiracy Theories Beyond Keyword Bias in German-Language Telegram Using Large Language Models

Nigerians have a notable online presence and actively discuss political and topical matters. This was particularly evident throughout the 2023 general election, where Twitter was used for campaigning, fact-checking and verification, and even positive and negative discourse. However, little or none has been done in the detection of abusive language and hate speech in Nigeria. In this paper, we curated \textit{code-switched} Twitter data directed at three musketeers of the governorship election on the most populous and economically vibrant state in Nigeria; Lagos state, with the view to detect offensive speech in political discussions. We developed EkoHate---an abusive language and hate speech dataset for political discussions between the three candidates and their followers using a binary (normal vs offensive) and fine-grained four-label annotation scheme. We analysed our dataset and provided an empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods across both supervised and cross-lingual transfer learning settings. In the supervised setting, our evaluation results in both binary and four-label annotation schemes show that we can achieve 95.1 and 70.3 F1 points respectively. Furthermore, we show that our dataset adequately transfers very well to three publicly available offensive datasets (OLID, HateUS2020, and FountaHate), generalizing to political discussions in other regions like the US.

EkoHate: Abusive Language and Hate Speech Detection for Code-switched Political Discussions on Nigerian Twitter

Abusive language detection has drawn increasing interest in recent years. However, a less systematically explored obstacle is label imbalance, i.e., the amount of abusive data is much lower than non-abusive data, leading to performance issues. The aim of this work is to conduct a comprehensive comparative study of popular methods for addressing the class imbalance issue. We explore 10 well-known approaches on 8 datasets with distinct characteristics: binary or multi-class, moderately or largely imbalanced, focusing on various types of abuse, etc. Additionally, we pro-
pose two novel methods specialized for abuse detection: AbusiveLexiconAug and ExternalDataAug, which enrich the training data using abusive lexicons and external abusive datasets, respectively. We conclude that: 1) our AbusiveLexiconAug approach, random oversampling, and focal loss are the most versatile methods on various datasets; 2) focal loss tends to yield peak model performance; 3) oversampling and focal loss provide promising results for binary datasets and small multi-class sets, while undersampling and weighted cross-entropy are more suitable for large multi-class sets; 4) most methods are sensitive to hyperparameters, yet our suggested choice of hyperparameters provides a good starting point.

A Study of the Class Imbalance Problem in Abusive Language Detection

We introduce the first expert annotated corpus of Facebook comments for Hausa hate speech detection. The corpus titled HausaHate comprises 2,000 comments extracted from Western African Facebook pages and manually annotated by three Hausa native speakers, who are also NLP experts. Our corpus was annotated using two different layers. We first labeled each comment according to a binary classification: offensive versus non-offensive. Then, offensive comments were also labeled according to hate speech targets: race, gender and none. Lastly, a baseline model using fine-tuned LLM for Hausa hate speech detection is presented, highlighting the challenges of hate speech detection tasks for indigenous languages in Africa, as well as future advances.

HausaHate: An Expert Annotated Corpus for Hausa Hate Speech Detection

Images increasingly constitute a larger portion of internet content, encoding even more complex meanings. Recent studies have highlight the pivotal role of visual communication in the spread of extremist content, particularly that associated with right-wing political ideologies. However, the capability of machine learning systems to recognize such meanings, sometimes implicit, remains limited. To enable future research in this area, we introduce and release VIDA, the Visual Incel Data Archive, a multimodal dataset comprising visual material and internet memes collected from two main Incel communities (Italian and Anglophone) known for their extremist misogynistic content. Following the analytical framework of Shifman (2014), we propose a new taxonomy for annotation across three main levels of analysis: content, form, and stance (hate). This allows for the association of images with fine-grained contextual information that help to identify the presence of offensiveness and a broader set of cultural references, enhancing the understanding of more nuanced aspects in visual communication. In this work we present a statistical analysis of the annotated dataset as well as discuss annotation examples and future line of research.

VIDA: The Visual Incel Data Archive. A Theory-oriented Annotated Dataset To Enhance Hate Detection Through Visual Culture

We present the Adversarial Nibbler Challenge, a novel red-teaming methodology for crowdsourcing implicitly adversarial prompts (those that trigger models to generate unsafe images for non-obvious reasons). Using a suite of state-of-the-art text-to-image models, a simple user interface, and outreach to engage diverse populations, we have captured long-tail safety issues that may be overlooked in standard testing. The first challenge round resulted in over 12k prompt-image pairs with machine annotations for safety, with 1.5k samples containing rich human annotations of harm types and attack strategies. Our findings emphasize the need for continual auditing as new vulnerabilities emerge in text-to-image models.

Adversarial Nibbler - A novel crowdsourcing procedure for detecting harmful content in t2i models

Manually annotating harmful content is economically and socially undesirable. While LLMs can be prompted to perform annotation tasks in zero-shot settings, little is known about the extent to which LLMs comply with prompt instructions and how prompt design can impact the quality of output annotations. To fill this gap, we conducted a large-scale experiment to re-annotate toxicity and rumor stance datasets using 3 LLMs and 16 prompts that vary in terms of definitions, output types, explanation, and prompt length. Initial results show that the choice of LLM matters more than prompt design. Within prompts, asking for a numerical score instead of a label can reduce output compliance and accuracy. Concise prompts can reduce annotation costs by up to 40\% but annotations may be less accurate. This work is part of an ongoing project as we plan to estimate how different annotations can impact downstream analyses of harmful content.

Does Prompt Engineering Matter for LLM-based Toxicity and Rumor Stance Detection? Evidence from a Large-scale Experiment

Detecting problematic content, such as hate speech, is a multifaceted and ever-changing task, influenced by social dynamics, user populations, diversity of sources, and evolving language. There has been significant efforts, both in academia and in industry, to develop annotated resources that capture various aspects of problematic content. Due to researchers' diverse objectives, these annotations are often inconsistent and hence, reports of progress on the detection of problematic content are fragmented. This pattern is expected to persist unless we pool these resources, taking into account the dynamic nature of this issue. In this paper, we propose integrating the available resources, leveraging their dynamic nature to break this pattern, and introduce a continual learning framework and benchmark for problematic content detection. Our benchmark, comprising 84 related tasks, creates a novel measure of progress: prioritizing the adaptability of classifiers to evolving tasks over excelling in specific tasks. To ensure continuous relevance, our benchmark is designed for seamless integration of new tasks. Our results demonstrate that continual learning methods outperform static approaches by up to 17% and 4% AUC in capturing the evolving content and adapting to novel forms of problematic content

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JSI and W\"{u}NLP at the DIALECT-COPA Shared Task: In-Context Learning From Just a Few Dialectal Examples Gets You Quite Far

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DIALECT-COPA: Extending the Standard Translations of the COPA Causal Commonsense Reasoning Dataset to South Slavic Dialects

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