Towards Offensive Language Identification for Dravidian Languages

Siva Sai, Yashvardhan Sharma


Abstract
Offensive speech identification in countries like India poses several challenges due to the usage of code-mixed and romanized variants of multiple languages by the users in their posts on social media. The challenge of offensive language identification on social media for Dravidian languages is harder, considering the low resources available for the same. In this paper, we explored the zero-shot learning and few-shot learning paradigms based on multilingual language models for offensive speech detection in code-mixed and romanized variants of three Dravidian languages - Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada. We propose a novel and flexible approach of selective translation and transliteration to reap better results from fine-tuning and ensembling multilingual transformer networks like XLMRoBERTa and mBERT. We implemented pretrained, fine-tuned, and ensembled versions of XLM-RoBERTa for offensive speech classification. Further, we experimented with interlanguage, inter-task, and multi-task transfer learning techniques to leverage the rich resources available for offensive speech identification in the English language and to enrich the models with knowledge transfer from related tasks. The proposed models yielded good results and are promising for effective offensive speech identification in low resource settings.
Anthology ID:
2021.dravidianlangtech-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Kyiv
Editors:
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Ruba Priyadharshini, Anand Kumar M, Parameswari Krishnamurthy, Elizabeth Sherly
Venue:
DravidianLangTech
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18–27
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.dravidianlangtech-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siva Sai and Yashvardhan Sharma. 2021. Towards Offensive Language Identification for Dravidian Languages. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, pages 18–27, Kyiv. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Offensive Language Identification for Dravidian Languages (Sai & Sharma, DravidianLangTech 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.dravidianlangtech-1.3.pdf
Software:
 2021.dravidianlangtech-1.3.Software.zip
Code
 sivaandme/tolidl_dravidianlangtech_eacl_2021