These working notes summarize the participation of the UMUTeam in the SemEval 2023 shared task: AfriSenti, focused on Sentiment Analysis in several African languages. Two subtasks are proposed, one in which each language is considered separately and another one in which all languages are merged. Our proposal to solve both subtasks is grounded on the combination of features extracted from several multilingual Large Language Models and a subset of language-independent linguistic features. Our best results are achieved with the African languages less represented in the training set: Xitsonga, a Mozambique dialect, with a weighted f1-score of 54.89\%; Algerian Arabic, with a weighted f1-score of 68.52\%; Swahili, with a weighted f1-score of 60.52\%; and Twi, with a weighted f1-score of 71.14%.

This working-notes are about the participation of the UMUTeam in a LT-EDI shared task concerning the identification of homophobic and transphobic comments in YouTube. These comments are written in English, which has high availability to machine-learning resources; Tamil, which has fewer resources; and a transliteration from Tamil to Roman script combined with English sentences. To carry out this shared task, we train a neural network that combines several feature sets applying a knowledge integration strategy. These features are linguistic features extracted from a tool developed by our research group and contextual and non-contextual sentence embeddings. We ranked 7th for English subtask (macro f1-score of 45%), 3rd for Tamil subtask (macro f1-score of 82%), and 2nd for Tamil-English subtask (macro f1-score of 58%).

In this manuscript we describe the participation of the UMUTeam on the MAMI shared task proposed at SemEval 2022. This task is concerning the identification of misogynous content from a multi-modal perspective. Our participation is grounded on the combination of different feature sets within the same neural network. Specifically, we combine linguistic features with contextual transformers based on text (BERT) and images (BEiT). Besides, we also evaluate other ensemble learning strategies and the usage of non-contextual pretrained embeddings. Although our results are limited, we outperform all the baselines proposed, achieving position 36 in the binary classification task with a macro F1-score of 0.687, and position 28 in the multi-label task of misogynous categorisation, with an macro F1-score of 0.663.

In this manuscript we detail the participation of the UMUTeam in the iSarcasm shared task (SemEval-2022). This shared task is related to the identification of sarcasm in English and Arabic documents. Our team achieve in the first challenge, a binary classification task, a F1 score of the sarcastic class of 17.97 for English and 31.75 for Arabic. For the second challenge, a multi-label classification, our results are not recorded due to an unknown problem. Therefore, we report the results of each sarcastic mechanism with the validation split. For our proposal, several neural networks that combine language-independent linguistic features with pre-trained embeddings are trained. The embeddings are based on different schemes, such as word and sentence embeddings, and contextual and non-contextual embeddings. Besides, we evaluate different techniques for the integration of the feature sets, such as ensemble learning and knowledge integration. In general, our best results are achieved using the knowledge integration strategy.