Janis Goldzycher


2022

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Hypothesis Engineering for Zero-Shot Hate Speech Detection
Janis Goldzycher | Gerold Schneider
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Threat, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC 2022)

Standard approaches to hate speech detection rely on sufficient available hate speech annotations. Extending previous work that repurposes natural language inference (NLI) models for zero-shot text classification, we propose a simple approach that combines multiple hypotheses to improve English NLI-based zero-shot hate speech detection. We first conduct an error analysis for vanilla NLI-based zero-shot hate speech detection and then develop four strategies based on this analysis. The strategies use multiple hypotheses to predict various aspects of an input text and combine these predictions into a final verdict. We find that the zero-shot baseline used for the initial error analysis already outperforms commercial systems and fine-tuned BERT-based hate speech detection models on HateCheck. The combination of the proposed strategies further increases the zero-shot accuracy of 79.4% on HateCheck by 7.9 percentage points (pp), and the accuracy of 69.6% on ETHOS by 10.0pp.

2019

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Geotagging a Diachronic Corpus of Alpine Texts: Comparing Distinct Approaches to Toponym Recognition
Tannon Kew | Anastassia Shaitarova | Isabel Meraner | Janis Goldzycher | Simon Clematide | Martin Volk
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology for Digital Historical Archives

Geotagging historic and cultural texts provides valuable access to heritage data, enabling location-based searching and new geographically related discoveries. In this paper, we describe two distinct approaches to geotagging a variety of fine-grained toponyms in a diachronic corpus of alpine texts. By applying a traditional gazetteer-based approach, aided by a few simple heuristics, we attain strong high-precision annotations. Using the output of this earlier system, we adopt a state-of-the-art neural approach in order to facilitate the detection of new toponyms on the basis of context. Additionally, we present the results of preliminary experiments on integrating a small amount of crowdsourced annotations to improve overall performance of toponym recognition in our heritage corpus.