Detection of Homophobia and Transphobia in social media comments serves as an important step in the overall development of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). In this research, we describe the system we formulated while participating in the shared task of Homophobia/ Transphobia detection as a part of the Fourth Workshop On Language Technology For Equality, Diversity, Inclusion (LT-EDI- 2024) at EACL 2024. We used an ensemble of three state-of-the-art multilingual transformer models, namely Multilingual BERT (mBERT), Multilingual Representations for Indic Languages (MuRIL) and XLM-RoBERTa to detect the presence of Homophobia or Transphobia in YouTube comments. The task comprised of datasets in ten languages - Hindi, English, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Spanish and Tulu. Our system achieved rank 1 for the Spanish and Tulu tasks, 2 for Telugu, 3 for Marathi and Gujarati, 4 for Tamil, 5 for Hindi and Kannada, 6 for English and 8 for Malayalam. These results speak for the efficacy of our ensemble model as well as the data augmentation strategy we adopted for the detection of anti-LGBT+ language in social media data.

Intimacy is an essential element of human relationships and language is a crucial means of conveying it. Textual intimacy analysis can reveal social norms in different contexts and serve as a benchmark for testing computational models’ ability to understand social information. In this paper, we propose a novel weak-labeling strategy for data augmentation in text regression tasks called WADER. WADER uses data augmentation to address the problems of data imbalance and data scarcity and provides a method for data augmentation in cross-lingual, zero-shot tasks. We benchmark the performance of State-of-the-Art pre-trained multilingual language models using WADER and analyze the use of sampling techniques to mitigate bias in data and optimally select augmentation candidates. Our results show that WADER outperforms the baseline model and provides a direction for mitigating data imbalance and scarcity in text regression tasks.