GUIR at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Domain-Tuned Contextualized Models for Offensive Language Detection

Sajad Sotudeh, Tong Xiang, Hao-Ren Yao, Sean MacAvaney, Eugene Yang, Nazli Goharian, Ophir Frieder


Abstract
Offensive language detection is an important and challenging task in natural language processing. We present our submissions to the OffensEval 2020 shared task, which includes three English sub-tasks: identifying the presence of offensive language (Sub-task A), identifying the presence of target in offensive language (Sub-task B), and identifying the categories of the target (Sub-task C). Our experiments explore using a domain-tuned contextualized language model (namely, BERT) for this task. We also experiment with different components and configurations (e.g., a multi-view SVM) stacked upon BERT models for specific sub-tasks. Our submissions achieve F1 scores of 91.7% in Sub-task A, 66.5% in Sub-task B, and 63.2% in Sub-task C. We perform an ablation study which reveals that domain tuning considerably improves the classification performance. Furthermore, error analysis shows common misclassification errors made by our model and outlines research directions for future.
Anthology ID:
2020.semeval-1.203
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona (online)
Editors:
Aurelie Herbelot, Xiaodan Zhu, Alexis Palmer, Nathan Schneider, Jonathan May, Ekaterina Shutova
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
International Committee for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1555–1561
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.203
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.semeval-1.203
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sajad Sotudeh, Tong Xiang, Hao-Ren Yao, Sean MacAvaney, Eugene Yang, Nazli Goharian, and Ophir Frieder. 2020. GUIR at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Domain-Tuned Contextualized Models for Offensive Language Detection. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 1555–1561, Barcelona (online). International Committee for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GUIR at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Domain-Tuned Contextualized Models for Offensive Language Detection (Sotudeh et al., SemEval 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.203.pdf
Data
OLID