“Hold on honey, men at work”: A semi-supervised approach to detecting sexism in sitcoms

Smriti Singh, Tanvi Anand, Arijit Ghosh Chowdhury, Zeerak Waseem


Abstract
Television shows play an important role inpropagating societal norms. Owing to the popularity of the situational comedy (sitcom) genre, it contributes significantly to the over-all development of society. In an effort to analyze the content of television shows belong-ing to this genre, we present a dataset of dialogue turns from popular sitcoms annotated for the presence of sexist remarks. We train a text classification model to detect sexism using domain adaptive learning. We apply the model to our dataset to analyze the evolution of sexist content over the years. We propose a domain-specific semi-supervised architecture for the aforementioned detection of sexism. Through extensive experiments, we show that our model often yields better classification performance over generic deep learn-ing based sentence classification that does not employ domain-specific training. We find that while sexism decreases over time on average,the proportion of sexist dialogue for the most sexist sitcom actually increases. A quantitative analysis along with a detailed error analysis presents the case for our proposed methodology
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-srw.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Jad Kabbara, Haitao Lin, Amandalynne Paullada, Jannis Vamvas
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
180–185
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-srw.19
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-srw.19
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Smriti Singh, Tanvi Anand, Arijit Ghosh Chowdhury, and Zeerak Waseem. 2021. “Hold on honey, men at work”: A semi-supervised approach to detecting sexism in sitcoms. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop, pages 180–185, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Hold on honey, men at work”: A semi-supervised approach to detecting sexism in sitcoms (Singh et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-srw.19.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-srw.19.mp4