Hate speech (HS) is a widely acknowledged societal problem with potentially grave effects on vulnerable individuals and minority groups. Developing counter-narratives (CNs) that confront biases and stereotypes driving hateful narratives is considered an impactful strategy. Current automatic methods focus on isolated utterances to detect and react to hateful content online, often omitting the conversational context where HS naturally occurs. In this work, we explore strategies for the incorporation of conversational history for CN generation, comparing text and graphical representations with varying degrees of context. Overall, automatic and human evaluations show that 1) contextualized representations are comparable to those of isolated utterances, and 2) models based on graph representations outperform text representations, thus opening new research directions for future work.

We present our approach to solving the task of identifying the effect of outdoor activities on social anxiety based on reddit posts. We employed state-of-the-art transformer models enhanced with a combination of advanced loss functions. Data augmentation techniques were also used to address class imbalance within the training set. Our method achieved a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.655 on the test data, surpassing the workshop’s mean F1-Score of 0.519. These findings suggest that integrating weighted loss functions improves the performance of transformer models in classifying unbalanced text data, while data augmentation can improve the model’s ability to generalize.

This paper addresses the shared task of multi-lingual emotion detection in tweets, presented at the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, and Social Media Analysis (WASSA) co-located with the ACL 2024 conference. The task involves predicting emotions from six classes in tweets from five different languages using only English for model training. Our approach focuses on addressing class imbalance through data augmentation, hierarchical classification, and the application of focal loss and weighted cross-entropy loss functions. These methods enhance our transformer-based model’s ability to transfer emotion detection capabilities across languages, resulting in improved performance despite the constraints of limited computational resources.

The Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR) shared task aims at detecting the degree of semantic relatedness between pairs of sentences on low-resource languages from Afroasiatic, Indoeuropean, Austronesian, Dravidian, and Nigercongo families. We use the Sentence-CROBI architecture to tackle this problem. The model is adapted from its original purpose of paraphrase detection to explore its capacities in a related task with limited resources and in multilingual and monolingual settings. Our approach combines the vector representation of cross-encoders and bi-encoders and possesses high adaptable capacity by combining several pre-trained models. Our system obtained good results on the low-resource languages of the dataset using a multilingual fine-tuning approach.

In the past few years, the NLP community has actively worked on detecting LGBT+Phobia in online spaces, using textual data publicly available Most of these are for the English language and its variants since it is the most studied language by the NLP community. Nevertheless, efforts towards creating corpora in other languages are active worldwide. Despite this, the Spanish language is an understudied language regarding digital LGBT+Phobia. The only corpus we found in the literature was for the Peninsular Spanish dialects, which use LGBT+phobic terms different than those in the Mexican dialect. For this reason, we present Homo-MEX, a novel corpus for detecting LGBT+Phobia in Mexican Spanish. In this paper, we describe our data-gathering and annotation process. Also, we present a classification benchmark using various traditional machine learning algorithms and two pre-trained deep learning models to showcase our corpus classification potential.

In this paper, we show the enhancing of the Demanded Skills Diagnosis (DiCoDe: Diagnóstico de Competencias Demandadas), a system developed by Mexico City’s Ministry of Labor and Employment Promotion (STyFE: Secretaría de Trabajo y Fomento del Empleo de la Ciudad de México) that seeks to reduce information asymmetries between job seekers and employers. The project uses webscraping techniques to retrieve job vacancies posted on private job portals on a daily basis and with the purpose of informing training and individual case management policies as well as labor market monitoring. For this purpose, a collaboration project between STyFE and the Language Engineering Group (GIL: Grupo de Ingeniería Lingüística) was established in order to enhance DiCoDe by applying NLP models and semantic analysis. By this collaboration, DiCoDe’s job vacancies system’s macro-structure and its geographic referencing at the city hall (municipality) level were improved. More specifically, dictionaries were created to identify demanded competencies, skills and abilities (CSA) and algorithms were developed for dynamic classifying of vacancies and identifying terms for searches on free text, in order to improve the results and processing time of queries.

This paper presents our systems to solve Task 3 of Semeval-2020, which aims to predict the effect that context has on human perception of similarity of words. The task consists of two subtasks in English, Croatian, Finnish, and Slovenian: (1) predicting the change of similarity and (2) predicting the human scores of similarity, both of them for a pair of words within two different contexts. We tackled the problem by developing two systems, the first one uses a centroid approach and word vectors. The second one uses the ELMo language model, which is trained for each pair of words with the given context. Our approach achieved the highest score in subtask 2 for the English language.

Word Association Norms (WAN) are collections that present stimuli words and the set of their associated responses. The corpus is widely used in diverse areas of expertise. In order to reduce the effort to have a good quality resource that can be reproduced in many languages with minimum sources, a methodology to build Automatic Word Association Norms is proposed (AWAN). The methodology has an input of two simple elements: a) dictionary, and b) pre-processed Word Embeddings. This new kind of WAN is evaluated in two ways: i) learning word embeddings based on the node2vec algorithm and comparing them with human annotated benchmarks, and ii) performing a lexical search for a reverse dictionary. Both evaluations are done in a weighted graph with the AWAN lexical elements. The results showed that the methodology produces good quality AWANs.

This paper presents our approach to the Task 5 of Semeval-2019, which aims at detecting hate speech against immigrants and women in Twitter. The task consists of two sub-tasks, in Spanish and English: (A) detection of hate speech and (B) classification of hateful tweets as aggressive or not, and identification of the target harassed as individual or group. We used linguistically motivated features and several types of n-grams (words, characters, functional words, punctuation symbols, POS, among others). For task A, we trained a Support Vector Machine using a combinatorial framework, whereas for task B we followed a multi-labeled approach using the Random Forest classifier. Our approach achieved the highest F1-score in sub-task A for the Spanish language.