Mircea-Adrian Tanase


2020

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UPB at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Multilingual Offensive Language Detection on Social Media by Fine-tuning a Variety of BERT-based Models
Mircea-Adrian Tanase | Dumitru-Clementin Cercel | Costin Chiru
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Offensive language detection is one of the most challenging problem in the natural language processing field, being imposed by the rising presence of this phenomenon in online social media. This paper describes our Transformer-based solutions for identifying offensive language on Twitter in five languages (i.e., English, Arabic, Danish, Greek, and Turkish), which was employed in Subtask A of the Offenseval 2020 shared task. Several neural architectures (i.e., BERT, mBERT, Roberta, XLM-Roberta, and ALBERT), pre-trained using both single-language and multilingual corpora, were fine-tuned and compared using multiple combinations of datasets. Finally, the highest-scoring models were used for our submissions in the competition, which ranked our team 21st of 85, 28th of 53, 19th of 39, 16th of 37, and 10th of 46 for English, Arabic, Danish, Greek, and Turkish, respectively.

2019

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Sentence-Level Propaganda Detection in News Articles with Transfer Learning and BERT-BiLSTM-Capsule Model
George-Alexandru Vlad | Mircea-Adrian Tanase | Cristian Onose | Dumitru-Clementin Cercel
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda

In recent years, the need for communication increased in online social media. Propaganda is a mechanism which was used throughout history to influence public opinion and it is gaining a new dimension with the rising interest of online social media. This paper presents our submission to NLP4IF-2019 Shared Task SLC: Sentence-level Propaganda Detection in news articles. The challenge of this task is to build a robust binary classifier able to provide corresponding propaganda labels, propaganda or non-propaganda. Our model relies on a unified neural network, which consists of several deep leaning modules, namely BERT, BiLSTM and Capsule, to solve the sentencelevel propaganda classification problem. In addition, we take a pre-training approach on a somewhat similar task (i.e., emotion classification) improving results against the cold-start model. Among the 26 participant teams in the NLP4IF-2019 Task SLC, our solution ranked 12th with an F1-score 0.5868 on the official test data. Our proposed solution indicates promising results since our system significantly exceeds the baseline approach of the organizers by 0.1521 and is slightly lower than the winning system by 0.0454.