NTUA-SLP at SemEval-2018 Task 3: Tracking Ironic Tweets using Ensembles of Word and Character Level Attentive RNNs

Christos Baziotis, Athanasiou Nikolaos, Pinelopi Papalampidi, Athanasia Kolovou, Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Nikolaos Ellinas, Alexandros Potamianos


Abstract
In this paper we present two deep-learning systems that competed at SemEval-2018 Task 3 “Irony detection in English tweets”. We design and ensemble two independent models, based on recurrent neural networks (Bi-LSTM), which operate at the word and character level, in order to capture both the semantic and syntactic information in tweets. Our models are augmented with a self-attention mechanism, in order to identify the most informative words. The embedding layer of our word-level model is initialized with word2vec word embeddings, pretrained on a collection of 550 million English tweets. We did not utilize any handcrafted features, lexicons or external datasets as prior information and our models are trained end-to-end using back propagation on constrained data. Furthermore, we provide visualizations of tweets with annotations for the salient tokens of the attention layer that can help to interpret the inner workings of the proposed models. We ranked 2nd out of 42 teams in Subtask A and 2nd out of 31 teams in Subtask B. However, post-task-completion enhancements of our models achieve state-of-the-art results ranking 1st for both subtasks.
Anthology ID:
S18-1100
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marianna Apidianaki, Saif M. Mohammad, Jonathan May, Ekaterina Shutova, Steven Bethard, Marine Carpuat
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
613–621
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S18-1100
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S18-1100
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christos Baziotis, Athanasiou Nikolaos, Pinelopi Papalampidi, Athanasia Kolovou, Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Nikolaos Ellinas, and Alexandros Potamianos. 2018. NTUA-SLP at SemEval-2018 Task 3: Tracking Ironic Tweets using Ensembles of Word and Character Level Attentive RNNs. In Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 613–621, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NTUA-SLP at SemEval-2018 Task 3: Tracking Ironic Tweets using Ensembles of Word and Character Level Attentive RNNs (Baziotis et al., SemEval 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/S18-1100.pdf
Code
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