Automatic offensive language detection has become a crucial issue in recent years. Existing researches on this topic are usually based on a large amount of data annotated at sentence level to train a robust model. However, sentence-level annotations are expensive in practice as the scenario expands, while there exist a large amount of natural labels from historical information on online platforms such as reports and punishments. Notably, these natural labels are usually in bag-level corresponding to the whole documents (articles, user profiles, conversations, etc.). Therefore, we target at proposing an approach capable of utilizing the bag-level labeled data for offensive language detection in this study. For this purpose, we formalize this task into a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem. We break down the design of existing MIL methods and propose a hybrid fusion MIL model with mutual-attention mechanism. In order to verify the validity of the proposed method, we present two new bag-level labeled datasets for offensive language detection: OLID-bags and MINOR. Experimental results based on the proposed datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the mutual-attention method at both sentence level and bag level.

Most language understanding models in task-oriented dialog systems are trained on a small amount of annotated training data, and evaluated in a small set from the same distribution. However, these models can lead to system failure or undesirable output when being exposed to natural language perturbation or variation in practice. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive evaluation and analysis with respect to the robustness of natural language understanding models, and introduce three important aspects related to language understanding in real-world dialog systems, namely, language variety, speech characteristics, and noise perturbation. We propose a model-agnostic toolkit LAUG to approximate natural language perturbations for testing the robustness issues in task-oriented dialog. Four data augmentation approaches covering the three aspects are assembled in LAUG, which reveals critical robustness issues in state-of-the-art models. The augmented dataset through LAUG can be used to facilitate future research on the robustness testing of language understanding in task-oriented dialog.