This paper describes our submission to the ALTA-2020 shared task on assessing behaviour from short text, We evaluate the effectiveness of traditional machine learning and recent transformers pre-trained models. Our submission with the Roberta-large model and prediction threshold achieved first place on the private leaderboard.

Code-switching is a phenomenon in which two or more languages are used in the same message. Nowadays, it is quite common to find messages with languages mixed in social media. This phenomenon presents a challenge for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we use a standard convolutional neural network model to predict the sentiment of tweets in a blend of Spanish and English languages. Our simple approach achieved a F1-score of 0:71 on test set on the competition. We analyze our best model capabilities and perform error analysis to expose important difficulties for classifying sentiment in a code-switching setting.

This paper details our approach to the task of detecting reportage of adverse drug reaction in tweets as part of the 2019 social media mining for healthcare applications shared task. We employed a combination of three types of word representations as input to a LSTM model. With this approach, we achieved an F1 score of 0.5209.

We describe the systems of NLP-CIC team that participated in the Complex Word Identification (CWI) 2018 shared task. The shared task aimed to benchmark approaches for identifying complex words in English and other languages from the perspective of non-native speakers. Our goal is to compare two approaches: feature engineering and a deep neural network. Both approaches achieved comparable performance on the English test set. We demonstrated the flexibility of the deep-learning approach by using the same deep neural network setup in the Spanish track. Our systems achieved competitive results: all our systems were within 0.01 of the system with the best macro-F1 score on the test sets except on Wikipedia test set, on which our best system is 0.04 below the best macro-F1 score.

With the advent of the read-write web which facilitates social interactions in online spaces, the rise of anti-social behaviour in online spaces has attracted the attention of researchers. In this paper, we address the challenge of automatically identifying aggression in social media posts. Our team, saroyehun, participated in the English track of the Aggression Detection in Social Media Shared Task. On this task, we investigate the efficacy of deep neural network models of varying complexity. Our results reveal that deep neural network models require more data points to do better than an NBSVM linear baseline based on character n-grams. Our improved deep neural network models were trained on augmented data and pseudo labeled examples. Our LSTM classifier receives a weighted macro-F1 score of 0.6425 to rank first overall on the Facebook subtask of the shared task. On the social media sub-task, our CNN-LSTM model records a weighted macro-F1 score of 0.5920 to place third overall.

We describe our submissions to the Third Social Media Mining for Health Applications Shared Task. We participated in two tasks (tasks 1 and 3). For both tasks, we experimented with a traditional machine learning model (Naive Bayes Support Vector Machine (NBSVM)), deep learning models (Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM)), and the combination of deep learning model with SVM. We observed that the NBSVM reaches superior performance on both tasks on our development split of the training data sets. Official result for task 1 based on the blind evaluation data shows that the predictions of the NBSVM achieved our team’s best F-score of 0.910 which is above the average score received by all submissions to the task. On task 3, the combination of of BiLSTM and SVM gives our best F-score for the positive class of 0.394.