In this paper, we discuss the development of an annotation schema to build datasets for evaluating the offline harm potential of social media texts. We define “harm potential” as the potential for an online public post to cause real-world physical harm (i.e., violence). Understanding that real-world violence is often spurred by a web of triggers, often combining several online tactics and pre-existing intersectional fissures in the social milieu, to result in targeted physical violence, we do not focus on any single divisive aspect (i.e., caste, gender, religion, or other identities of the victim and perpetrators) nor do we focus on just hate speech or mis/dis-information. Rather, our understanding of the intersectional causes of such triggers focuses our attempt at measuring the harm potential of online content, irrespective of whether it is hateful or not. In this paper, we discuss the development of a framework/annotation schema that allows annotating the data with different aspects of the text including its socio-political grounding and intent of the speaker (as expressed through mood and modality) that together contribute to it being a trigger for offline harm. We also give a comparative analysis and mapping of our framework with some of the existing frameworks.

The paper discusses the Linguistic Field Data Management and Analysis System (LiFE), a new open-source, web-based software that systematises storage, management, annotation, analysis and sharing of linguistic data gathered from the field as well as that crawled from various sources on the web such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blog, Newspaper, Wikipedia, etc. The app supports two broad workflows - (a) the field linguists’ workflow in which data is collected directly from the speakers in the field and analysed further to produce grammatical descriptions, lexicons, educational materials and possibly language technologies; (b) the computational linguists’ workflow in which data collected from the web using automated crawlers or digitised using manual or semi-automatic means, annotated for various tasks and then used for developing different kinds of language technologies. In addition to supporting these workflows, the app provides some additional features as well - (a) it allows multiple users to collaboratively work on the same project via its granular access control and sharing option; (b) it allows the data to be exported to various formats including CSV, TSV, JSON, XLSX, , PDF, Textgrid, RDF (different serialisation formats) etc as appropriate; (c) it allows data import from various formats viz. LIFT XML, XLSX, JSON, CSV, TSV, Textgrid, etc; (d) it allows users to start working in the app at any stage of their work by giving the option to either create a new project from scratch or derive a new project from an existing project in the app.The app is currently available for use and testing on our server (http://life.unreal-tece.co.in/) and its source code has been released under AGPL license on our GitHub repository (https://github.com/unrealtecellp/life). It is licensed under separate, specific conditions for commercial usage.

The paper presents a new software - Linguistic Field Data Management and Analysis System - LiFE for endangered and low-resourced languages - an open-source, web-based linguistic data analysis and management application allowing systematic storage, management, usage and sharing of linguistic data collected from the field. The application enables users to store lexical items, sentences, paragraphs, audio-visual content including photographs, video clips, speech recordings, etc, with rich glossing and annotation. For field linguists, it provides facilities to generate interactive and print dictionaries; for NLP practitioners, it provides the data storage and representation in standard formats such as RDF, JSON and CSV. The tool provides a one-click interface to train NLP models for various tasks using the data stored in the system and then use it for assistance in further storage of the data (especially for the field linguists). At the same time, the tool also provides the facility of using the models trained outside of the tool for data storage, transcription, annotation and other tasks. The web-based application, allows for seamless collaboration among multiple persons and sharing the data, models, etc with each other.

In this paper, we discuss the development of a multilingual dataset annotated with a hierarchical, fine-grained tagset marking different types of aggression and the “context” in which they occur. The context, here, is defined by the conversational thread in which a specific comment occurs and also the “type” of discursive role that the comment is performing with respect to the previous comment. The initial dataset, being discussed here consists of a total 59,152 annotated comments in four languages - Meitei, Bangla, Hindi, and Indian English - collected from various social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Telegram. As is usual on social media websites, a large number of these comments are multilingual, mostly code-mixed with English. The paper gives a detailed description of the tagset being used for annotation and also the process of developing a multi-label, fine-grained tagset that has been used for marking comments with aggression and bias of various kinds including sexism (called gender bias in the tagset), religious intolerance (called communal bias in the tagset), class/caste bias and ethnic/racial bias. We also define and discuss the tags that have been used for marking the different discursive role being performed through the comments, such as attack, defend, etc. Finally, we present a basic statistical analysis of the dataset. The dataset is being incrementally made publicly available on the project website.

In the proposed demo, we will present a new software - Linguistic Field Data Management and Analysis System - LiFE - an open-source, web-based linguistic data management and analysis application that allows for systematic storage, management, sharing and usage of linguistic data collected from the field. The application allows users to store lexical items, sentences, paragraphs, audio-visual content including photographs, video clips, speech recordings, etc, along with rich glossing / annotation; generate interactive and print dictionaries; and also train and use natural language processing tools and models for various purposes using this data. Since its a web-based application, it also allows for seamless collaboration among multiple persons and sharing the data, models, etc with each other. The system uses the Python-based Flask framework and MongoDB (as database) in the backend and HTML, CSS and Javascript at the frontend. The interface allows creation of multiple projects that could be shared with the other users. At the backend, the application stores the data in RDF format so as to allow its release as Linked Data over the web using semantic web technologies - as of now it makes use of the OntoLex-Lemon for storing the lexical data and Ligt for storing the interlinear glossed text and then internally linking it to the other linked lexicons and databases such as DBpedia and WordNet. Furthermore it provides support for training the NLP systems using scikit-learn and HuggingFace Transformers libraries as well as make use of any model trained using these libraries - while the user interface itself provides limited options for tuning the system, an externally-trained model could be easily incorporated within the application; similarly the dataset itself could be easily exported into a standard machine-readable format like JSON or CSV that could be consumed by other programs and pipelines. The system is built as an online platform; however since we are making the source code available, it could be installed by users on their internal / personal servers as well.

This paper presents the findings of the ICON-2021 shared task on Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification, which aims to identify aggression, gender bias, and communal bias in data presented in four languages: Meitei, Bangla, Hindi and English. The participants were presented the option of approaching the task as three separate classification tasks or a multi-label classification task or a structured classification task. If approached as three separate classification tasks, the task includes three sub-tasks: aggression identification (sub-task A), gender bias identification (sub-task B), and communal bias identification (sub-task C). For this task, the participating teams were provided with a total dataset of approximately 12,000, with 3,000 comments across each of the four languages, sourced from popular social media sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Telegram and the the three labels presented as a single tuple. For the test systems, approximately 1,000 comments were provided in each language for every sub-task. We attracted a total of 54 registrations in the task, out of which 11 teams submitted their test runs. The best system obtained an overall instance-F1 of 0.371 in the multilingual test set (it was simply a combined test set of the instances in each individual language). In the individual sub-tasks, the best micro f1 scores are 0.539, 0.767 and 0.834 respectively for each of the sub-task A, B and C. The best overall, averaged micro f1 is 0.713. The results show that while systems have managed to perform reasonably well in individual sub-tasks, especially gender bias and communal bias tasks, it is substantially more difficult to do a 3-class classification of aggression level and even more difficult to build a system that correctly classifies everything right. It is only in slightly over 1/3 of the instances that most of the systems predicted the correct class across the board, despite the fact that there was a significant overlap across the three sub-tasks.

The paper presents Anlirika’s submission to SIGTYP 2021 Shared Task on Robust Spoken Language Identification. The task aims at building a robust system that generalizes well across different domains and speakers. The training data is limited to a single domain only with predominantly single speaker per language while the validation and test data samples are derived from diverse dataset and multiple speakers. We experiment with a neural system comprising a combination of dense, convolutional, and recurrent layers that are designed to perform better generalization and obtain speaker-invariant representations. We demonstrate that the task in its constrained form (without making use of external data or augmentation the train set with samples from the validation set) is still challenging. Our best system trained on the data augmented with validation samples achieves 29.9% accuracy on the test data.

In this paper, we discuss the development of a multilingual annotated corpus of misogyny and aggression in Indian English, Hindi, and Indian Bangla as part of a project on studying and automatically identifying misogyny and communalism on social media (the ComMA Project). The dataset is collected from comments on YouTube videos and currently contains a total of over 20,000 comments. The comments are annotated at two levels - aggression (overtly aggressive, covertly aggressive, and non-aggressive) and misogyny (gendered and non-gendered). We describe the process of data collection, the tagset used for annotation, and issues and challenges faced during the process of annotation. Finally, we discuss the results of the baseline experiments conducted to develop a classifier for misogyny in the three languages.