In this paper, we present our contribution to SemEval 2019 Task 5 Multilingual Detection of Hate, specifically in the Subtask A (English and Spanish). We compare different configurations of shallow and deep learning approaches on the English data and use the system that performs best in both sub-tasks. The resulting SVM-based system with lexicosemantic features (n-grams and embeddings) is ranked 23rd out of 69 on the English data and beats the baseline system. On the Spanish data our system is ranked 25th out of 39.

We present results for Subtask A and C of SemEval 2019 Shared Task 6. In Subtask A, we experiment with an embedding representation of postings and use BERT to categorize postings. Our best result reaches the 10th place (out of 103). In Subtask C, we applied a two-vote classification approach with minority fallback, which is placed on the 19th rank (out of 65).

Being able to predict whether people agree or disagree with an assertion (i.e. an explicit, self-contained statement) has several applications ranging from predicting how many people will like or dislike a social media post to classifying posts based on whether they are in accordance with a particular point of view. We formalize this as two NLP tasks: predicting judgments of (i) individuals and (ii) groups based on the text of the assertion and previous judgments. We evaluate a wide range of approaches on a crowdsourced data set containing over 100,000 judgments on over 2,000 assertions. We find that predicting individual judgments is a hard task with our best results only slightly exceeding a majority baseline, but that judgments of groups can be more reliably predicted using a Siamese neural network, which outperforms all other approaches by a wide margin.