WLV-RIT at SemEval-2021 Task 5: A Neural Transformer Framework for Detecting Toxic Spans

Tharindu Ranasinghe, Diptanu Sarkar, Marcos Zampieri, Alexander Ororbia

Abstract
In recent years, the widespread use of social media has led to an increase in the generation of toxic and offensive content on online platforms. In response, social media platforms have worked on developing automatic detection methods and employing human moderators to cope with this deluge of offensive content. While various state-of-the-art statistical models have been applied to detect toxic posts, there are only a few studies that focus on detecting the words or expressions that make a post offensive. This motivates the organization of the SemEval-2021 Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection competition, which has provided participants with a dataset containing toxic spans annotation in English posts. In this paper, we present the WLV-RIT entry for the SemEval-2021 Task 5. Our best performing neural transformer model achieves an 0.68 F1-Score. Furthermore, we develop an open-source framework for multilingual detection of offensive spans, i.e., MUDES, based on neural transformers that detect toxic spans in texts.
Anthology ID:
2021.semeval-1.111
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Alexis Palmer, Nathan Schneider, Natalie Schluter, Guy Emerson, Aurelie Herbelot, Xiaodan Zhu
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
833–840
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.semeval-1.111
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.111
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tharindu Ranasinghe, Diptanu Sarkar, Marcos Zampieri, and Alexander Ororbia. 2021. WLV-RIT at SemEval-2021 Task 5: A Neural Transformer Framework for Detecting Toxic Spans. In Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021), pages 833–840, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
WLV-RIT at SemEval-2021 Task 5: A Neural Transformer Framework for Detecting Toxic Spans (Ranasinghe et al., SemEval 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2021.semeval-1.111.pdf
Code
 tharindudr/MUDES
Data
HatEval, HateXplain
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