Multilingual Offensive Language Identification with Cross-lingual Embeddings

Tharindu Ranasinghe, Marcos Zampieri


Abstract
Offensive content is pervasive in social media and a reason for concern to companies and government organizations. Several studies have been recently published investigating methods to detect the various forms of such content (e.g. hate speech, cyberbulling, and cyberaggression). The clear majority of these studies deal with English partially because most annotated datasets available contain English data. In this paper, we take advantage of English data available by applying cross-lingual contextual word embeddings and transfer learning to make predictions in languages with less resources. We project predictions on comparable data in Bengali, Hindi, and Spanish and we report results of 0.8415 F1 macro for Bengali, 0.8568 F1 macro for Hindi, and 0.7513 F1 macro for Spanish. Finally, we show that our approach compares favorably to the best systems submitted to recent shared tasks on these three languages, confirming the robustness of cross-lingual contextual embeddings and transfer learning for this task.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.470
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5838–5844
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.470
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.470
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tharindu Ranasinghe and Marcos Zampieri. 2020. Multilingual Offensive Language Identification with Cross-lingual Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5838–5844, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual Offensive Language Identification with Cross-lingual Embeddings (Ranasinghe & Zampieri, EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.470.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939026
Code
 tharindudr/DeepOffense
Data
HatEvalOLID