bitsa_nlp@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Leveraging Pretrained Language Models for Detecting Homophobia and Transphobia in Social Media Comments
Vitthal Bhandari, Poonam Goyal · 2022
Online social networks are ubiquitous and userfriendly.Nevertheless, it is vital to detect and moderate offensive content to maintain decency and empathy.However, mining social media texts is a complex task since users don't adhere to any fixed patterns.Comments can be written in any combination of languages and many of them may be low-resource.In this paper, we present our system for the LT-EDI shared task on detecting homophobia and transphobia in social media comments.We experiment with a number of monolingual and multilingual transformer based models such as mBERT along with a data augmentation technique for tackling class imbalance.Such pretrained large models have recently shown tremendous success on a variety of benchmark tasks in natural language processing.We observe their performance on a carefully annotated, real life dataset of YouTube comments in English as well as Tamil.Our submission achieved ranks 9, 6 and 3 with a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.42, 0.64 and 0.58 in the English, Tamil and Tamil-English subtasks respectively.The code for the system has been open sourced 1 .