Pre-trained language models have been widely applied to standard benchmarks. Due to the flexibility of natural language, the available resources in a certain domain can be restricted to support obtaining precise representation. To address this issue, we propose a novel Transformer-based language model named VarMAE for domain-adaptive language understanding. Under the masked autoencoding objective, we design a context uncertainty learning module to encode the token’s context into a smooth latent distribution. The module can produce diverse and well-formed contextual representations. Experiments on science- and finance-domain NLU tasks demonstrate that VarMAE can be efficiently adapted to new domains with limited resources.

Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) has a large harmful impact and is difficult to detect, both for human judges and existing NLP systems. At SemEval-2022 Task 4, we propose a novel Transformer-based model and its ensembles to accurately understand such language context for PCL detection. To facilitate comprehension of the subtle and subjective nature of PCL, two fine-tuning strategies are applied to capture discriminative features from diverse linguistic behaviour and categorical distribution. The system achieves remarkable results on the official ranking, including 1st in Subtask 1 and 5th in Subtask 2. Extensive experiments on the task demonstrate the effectiveness of our system and its strategies.

This paper describes our system used in the SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI). Multimedia automatic misogyny recognition consists of the identification of misogynous memes, taking advantage of both text and images as sources of information. The task will be organized around two main subtasks: Task A is a binary classification task, which should be identified either as misogynous or not misogynous. Task B is a multi-label classification task, in which the types of misogyny should be identified in potential overlapping categories, such as stereotype, shaming, objectification, and violence. In this paper, we proposed a system based on multi-task learning for multi-modal misogynous detection in memes. Our system combined image features with text features to train a multi-label classification. The prediction results were obtained by the simple weighted average method of the results with different fusion models, and the results of Task A were corrected by Task B. Our system achieves a test accuracy of 0.755 on Task A (ranking 3rd on the final leaderboard) and the accuracy of 0.731 on Task B (ranking 1st on the final leaderboard).

This paper describes the method we utilized in the SemEval-2022 Task 6 iSarcasmEval: Intended Sarcasm Detection In English and Arabic. Our system has achieved 1st in SubtaskB, which is to identify the categories of intended sarcasm. The proposed system integrates multiple BERT-based, RoBERTa-based and BERTweet-based models with finetuning. In this task, we contributed the following: 1) we reveal several large pre-trained models’ performance on tasks coping with the tweet-like text. 2) Our methods prove that we can still achieve excellent results in this particular task without a complex classifier adopting some proper training method. 3) we found there is a hierarchical relationship of sarcasm types in this task.

This paper describes the systematic approach applied in “SemEval-2022 Task 6 (iSarcasmEval) : Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic”. In particular, we illustrate the proposed system in detail for SubTask-A about determining a given text as sarcastic or non-sarcastic in English. We start with the training data from the officially released data and then experiment with different combinations of public datasets to improve the model generalization. Additional experiments conducted on the task demonstrate our strategies are effective in completing the task. Different transformer-based language models, as well as some popular plug-and-play proirs, are mixed into our system to enhance the model’s robustness. Furthermore, statistical and lexical-based text features are mined to improve the accuracy of the sarcasm detection. Our final submission achieves an F1-score for the sarcastic class of 0.6052 on the official test set (the top 1 of the 43 teams in “SubTask-A-English” on the leaderboard).

This paper describes our system used in the SemEval-2022 Task 7(Roth et al.): Identifying Plausible Clarifications of Implicit and Under-specified Phrases. Semeval Task7 is an more complex cloze task, different than normal cloze task, only requiring NLP system could find the best fillers for sentence. In Semeval Task7, NLP system not only need to choose the best fillers for each input instance, but also evaluate the quality of all possible fillers and give them a relative score according to context semantic information. We propose an ensemble of different state-of-the-art transformer-based language models(i.e., RoBERTa and Deberta) with some plug-and-play tricks, such as Grouped Layerwise Learning Rate Decay (GLLRD) strategy, contrastive learning loss, different pooling head and an external input data preprecess block before the information came into pretrained language models, which improve performance significantly. The main contributions of our sys-tem are 1) revealing the performance discrepancy of different transformer-based pretraining models on the downstream task; 2) presenting an efficient learning-rate and parameter attenuation strategy when fintuning pretrained language models; 3) adding different constrative learning loss to improve model performance; 4) showing the useful of the different pooling head structure. Our system achieves a test accuracy of 0.654 on subtask1(ranking 4th on the leaderboard) and a test Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient of 0.785 on subtask2(ranking 2nd on the leaderboard).