cantnlp@LT-EDI-2023: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments using Spatio-Temporally Retrained Language Models

Sidney Wong, Matthew Durward, Benjamin Adams, Jonathan Dunn


Abstract
This paper describes our multiclass classification system developed as part of the LT-EDI@RANLP-2023 shared task. We used a BERT-based language model to detect homophobic and transphobic content in social media comments across five language conditions: English, Spanish, Hindi, Malayalam, and Tamil. We retrained a transformer-based cross-language pretrained language model, XLM-RoBERTa, with spatially and temporally relevant social media language data. We found the inclusion of this spatio-temporal data improved the classification performance for all language and task conditions when compared with the baseline. We also retrained a subset of models with simulated script-mixed social media language data with varied performance. The results from the current study suggests that transformer-based language classification systems are sensitive to register-specific and language-specific retraining.
Anthology ID:
2023.ltedi-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Bharathi R. Chakravarthi, B. Bharathi, Joephine Griffith, Kalika Bali, Paul Buitelaar
Venues:
LTEDI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
103–108
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ltedi-1.15
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sidney Wong, Matthew Durward, Benjamin Adams, and Jonathan Dunn. 2023. cantnlp@LT-EDI-2023: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments using Spatio-Temporally Retrained Language Models. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, pages 103–108, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
cantnlp@LT-EDI-2023: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments using Spatio-Temporally Retrained Language Models (Wong et al., LTEDI-WS 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ltedi-1.15.pdf