Duluth at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Offensive Tweet Identification in English with Logistic Regression

Ted Pedersen


Abstract
This paper describes the Duluth systems that participated in SemEval–2020 Task 12, Multilingual Offensive Language Identification in Social Media (OffensEval–2020). We participated in the three English language tasks. Our systems provide a simple machine learning baseline using logistic regression. We trained our models on the distantly supervised training data made available by the task organizers and used no other resources. As might be expected we did not rank highly in the comparative evaluation: 79th of 85 in task A, 34th of 43 in task B, and 24th of 39 in task C. We carried out a qualitative analysis of our results and found that the class labels in the gold standard data are somewhat noisy. We hypothesize that the extremely high accuracy (>$ 90%) of the top ranked systems may reflect methods that learn the training data very well but may not generalize to the task of identifying offensive language in English. This analysis includes examples of tweets that despite being mildly redacted are still offensive.
Anthology ID:
2020.semeval-1.255
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:
1938–1946
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.255
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.semeval-1.255
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ted Pedersen. 2020. Duluth at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Offensive Tweet Identification in English with Logistic Regression. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 1938–1946, Barcelona (online). International Committee for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Duluth at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Offensive Tweet Identification in English with Logistic Regression (Pedersen, SemEval 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.semeval-1.255.pdf
Data
OLID