Noisy Self-Training with Data Augmentations for Offensive and Hate Speech Detection Tasks

João Leite, Carolina Scarton, Diego Silva


Abstract
Online social media is rife with offensive and hateful comments, prompting the need for their automatic detection given the sheer amount of posts created every second. Creating high-quality human-labelled datasets for this task is difficult and costly, especially because non-offensive posts are significantly more frequent than offensive ones. However, unlabelled data is abundant, easier, and cheaper to obtain. In this scenario, self-training methods, using weakly-labelled examples to increase the amount of training data, can be employed. Recent “noisy” self-training approaches incorporate data augmentation techniques to ensure prediction consistency and increase robustness against noisy data and adversarial attacks. In this paper, we experiment with default and noisy self-training using three different textual data augmentation techniques across five different pre-trained BERT architectures varying in size. We evaluate our experiments on two offensive/hate-speech datasets and demonstrate that (i) self-training consistently improves performance regardless of model size, resulting in up to +1.5% F1-macro on both datasets, and (ii) noisy self-training with textual data augmentations, despite being successfully applied in similar settings, decreases performance on offensive and hate-speech domains when compared to the default method, even with state-of-the-art augmentations such as backtranslation.
Anthology ID:
2023.ranlp-1.68
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
631–640
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.68
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
João Leite, Carolina Scarton, and Diego Silva. 2023. Noisy Self-Training with Data Augmentations for Offensive and Hate Speech Detection Tasks. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 631–640, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Noisy Self-Training with Data Augmentations for Offensive and Hate Speech Detection Tasks (Leite et al., RANLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.68.pdf