Despite the progress made in recent years in addressing natural language understanding (NLU) challenges, the majority of this progress remains to be concentrated on resource-rich languages like English. This work focuses on Persian language, one of the widely spoken languages in the world, and yet there are few NLU datasets available for this language. The availability of high-quality evaluation datasets is a necessity for reliable assessment of the progress on different NLU tasks and domains. We introduce ParsiNLU, the first benchmark in Persian language that includes a range of language understanding tasks—reading comprehension, textual entailment, and so on. These datasets are collected in a multitude of ways, often involving manual annotations by native speakers. This results in over 14.5k new instances across 6 distinct NLU tasks. Additionally, we present the first results on state-of-the-art monolingual and multilingual pre-trained language models on this benchmark and compare them with human performance, which provides valuable insights into our ability to tackle natural language understanding challenges in Persian. We hope ParsiNLU fosters further research and advances in Persian language understanding.1

In this paper, we introduce the task of predicting severity of age-restricted aspects of movie content based solely on the dialogue script. We first investigate categorizing the ordinal severity of movies on 5 aspects: Sex, Violence, Profanity, Substance consumption, and Frightening scenes. The problem is handled using a siamese network-based multitask framework which concurrently improves the interpretability of the predictions. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model and provides useful information to interpret model predictions. The proposed dataset and source code are publicly available at our GitHub repository.

In this work, we explore different approaches to combine modalities for the problem of automated age-suitability rating of movie trailers. First, we introduce a new dataset containing videos of movie trailers in English downloaded from IMDB and YouTube, along with their corresponding age-suitability rating labels. Secondly, we propose a multi-modal deep learning pipeline addressing the movie trailer age suitability rating problem. This is the first attempt to combine video, audio, and speech information for this problem, and our experimental results show that multi-modal approaches significantly outperform the best mono and bimodal models in this task.

Movies help us learn and inspire societal change. But they can also contain objectionable content that negatively affects viewers’ behaviour, especially children. In this paper, our goal is to predict the suitability of movie content for children and young adults based on scripts. The criterion that we use to measure suitability is the MPAA rating that is specifically designed for this purpose. We create a corpus for movie MPAA ratings and propose an RNN based architecture with attention that jointly models the genre and the emotions in the script to predict the MPAA rating. We achieve 81% weighted F1-score for the classification model that outperforms the traditional machine learning method by 7%.

In recent years, abusive behavior has become a serious issue in online social networks. In this paper, we present a new corpus for the task of abusive language detection that is collected from a semi-anonymous online platform, and unlike the majority of other available resources, is not created based on a specific list of bad words. We also develop computational models to incorporate emotions into textual cues to improve aggression identification. We evaluate our proposed methods on a set of corpora related to the task and show promising results with respect to abusive language detection.