Behnam Bahrak


2022

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AliEdalat at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection using Fine-tuned Language Models, BERT+BiGRU, and Ensemble Models
Ali Edalat | Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh | Behnam Bahrak
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

This paper presents the AliEdalat team’s methodology and results in SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) Detection. This task aims to detect the presence of PCL and PCL categories in text in order to prevent further discrimination against vulnerable communities. We use an ensemble of three basic models to detect the presence of PCL: fine-tuned bigbird, fine-tuned mpnet, and BERT+BiGRU. The ensemble model performs worse than the baseline due to overfitting and achieves an F1-score of 0.3031. We offer another solution to resolve the submitted model’s problem. We consider the different categories of PCL separately. To detect each category of PCL, we act like a PCL detector. Instead of BERT+BiGRU, we use fine-tuned roberta in the models. In PCL category detection, our model outperforms the baseline model and achieves an F1-score of 0.2531. We also present new models for detecting two categories of PCL that outperform the submitted models.

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UTNLP at SemEval-2022 Task 6: A Comparative Analysis of Sarcasm Detection Using Generative-based and Mutation-based Data Augmentation
Amirhossein Abaskohi | Arash Rasouli | Tanin Zeraati | Behnam Bahrak
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

Sarcasm is a term that refers to the use of words to mock, irritate, or amuse someone. It is commonly used on social media. The metaphorical and creative nature of sarcasm presents a significant difficulty for sentiment analysis systems based on affective computing. The methodology and results of our team, UTNLP, in the SemEval-2022 shared task 6 on sarcasm detection are presented in this paper. We put different models, and data augmentation approaches to the test and report on which one works best. The tests begin with traditional machine learning models and progress to transformer-based and attention-based models. We employed data augmentation based on data mutation and data generation. Using RoBERTa and mutation-based data augmentation, our best approach achieved an F1-score of 0.38 in the competition’s evaluation phase. After the competition, we fixed our model’s flaws and achieved anF1-score of 0.414.

2021

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EmoPars: A Collection of 30K Emotion-Annotated Persian Social Media Texts
Nazanin Sabri | Reyhane Akhavan | Behnam Bahrak
Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop Associated with RANLP 2021

The wide reach of social media platforms, such as Twitter, have enabled many users to share their thoughts, opinions and emotions on various topics online. The ability to detect these emotions automatically would allow social scientists, as well as, businesses to better understand responses from nations and costumers. In this study we introduce a dataset of 30,000 Persian Tweets labeled with Ekman’s six basic emotions (Anger, Fear, Happiness, Sadness, Hatred, and Wonder). This is the first publicly available emotion dataset in the Persian language. In this paper, we explain the data collection and labeling scheme used for the creation of this dataset. We also analyze the created dataset, showing the different features and characteristics of the data. Among other things, we investigate co-occurrence of different emotions in the dataset, and the relationship between sentiment and emotion of textual instances. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/nazaninsbr/Persian-Emotion-Detection.

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UTNLP at SemEval-2021 Task 5: A Comparative Analysis of Toxic Span Detection using Attention-based, Named Entity Recognition, and Ensemble Models
Alireza Salemi | Nazanin Sabri | Emad Kebriaei | Behnam Bahrak | Azadeh Shakery
Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)

Detecting which parts of a sentence contribute to that sentence’s toxicity—rather than providing a sentence-level verdict of hatefulness— would increase the interpretability of models and allow human moderators to better understand the outputs of the system. This paper presents our team’s, UTNLP, methodology and results in the SemEval-2021 shared task 5 on toxic spans detection. We test multiple models and contextual embeddings and report the best setting out of all. The experiments start with keyword-based models and are followed by attention-based, named entity- based, transformers-based, and ensemble models. Our best approach, an ensemble model, achieves an F1 of 0.684 in the competition’s evaluation phase.