Carlos Perelló


2019

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UA at SemEval-2019 Task 5: Setting A Strong Linear Baseline for Hate Speech Detection
Carlos Perelló | David Tomás | Alberto Garcia-Garcia | Jose Garcia-Rodriguez | Jose Camacho-Collados
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper describes the system developed at the University of Alicante (UA) for the SemEval 2019 Task 5: Shared Task on Multilingual Detection of Hate. The purpose of this work is to build a strong baseline for hate speech detection, using a traditional machine learning approach with standard textual features, which could serve in a near future as a reference to compare with deep learning systems. We participated in both task A (Hate Speech Detection against Immigrants and Women) and task B (Aggressive behavior and Target Classification). Despite its simplicity, our system obtained a remarkable F1-score of 72.5 (sixth highest) and an accuracy of 73.6 (second highest) in Spanish (task A), outperforming more complex neural models from a total of 40 participant systems.