Diogo Fernandes
2026
ToxSyn-PT: A Synthetic Fine-Grained Dataset of Minority-Targeted Toxic Language in Portuguese
Iago Alves Brito | Julia Soares Dollis | Fernanda Bufon Farber | Diogo Fernandes | Arlindo R. Galvão Filho
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Iago Alves Brito | Julia Soares Dollis | Fernanda Bufon Farber | Diogo Fernandes | Arlindo R. Galvão Filho
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
The development of robust hate speech detection systems remains limited by the lack of large-scale, fine-grained training data, especially for languages beyond English. Existing corpora typically rely on simplistic toxic and non-toxic labels, and the few that capture hate directed at specific minority groups lack the positive counterexamples required to distinguish genuine hate from mere discussion. In this work, we introduce ToxSyn-PT, the first Portuguese large-scale corpus explicitly designed for multi-label hate speech detection across nine protected minority groups, including the non-toxic counterexamples absent in all other public datasets. Generated via a controllable four-stage pipeline, ToxSyn contains discourse-type annotations to capture rhetorical strategies of toxic/non-toxic language, such as sarcasm, dehumanization, and cultural appreciation. Our experiments reveal a catastrophic, mutual generalization failure compared to existing datasets from social-media domains: models trained on social media struggle to generalize to minority-specific contexts, and vice-versa. This finding indicates they are distinct tasks and exposes summary metrics like Macro F1 can be unreliable indicators of true model behavior, as they completely mask model failure. We publicly release ToxSyn on HuggingFace to support reproducible research on synthetic data generation and benchmark progress in hate-speech detection for low- and mid-resource languages.
2022
CEIA-NLP at CASE 2022 Task 1: Protest News Detection for Portuguese
Diogo Fernandes | Adalberto Junior | Gabriel Marques | Anderson Soares | Arlindo Galvao Filho
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE)
Diogo Fernandes | Adalberto Junior | Gabriel Marques | Anderson Soares | Arlindo Galvao Filho
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE)
This paper summarizes our work on the document classification subtask of Multilingual protest news detection of the CASE @ ACL-IJCNLP 2022 workshok. In this context, we investigate the performance of monolingual and multilingual transformer-based models in low data resources, taking Portuguese as an example and evaluating language models on document classification. Our approach became the winning solution in Portuguese document classification achieving 0.8007 F1 Score on Test set. The experimental results demonstrate that multilingual models achieve best results in scenarios with few dataset samples of specific language, because we can train models using datasets from other languages of the same task and domain.