Cyberbullying has become more prevalent over time, especially towards minority groups, and online human moderators cannot detect cyberbullying content efficiently. Prior work has addressed this problem by detecting cyberbullying with deep learning approaches. In this project, we compare several BERT-based benchmark methods for cyberbullying detection and do a failure analysis to see where the model fails to correctly identify cyberbullying. We find that many falsely classified texts are sarcastic, so we propose a method to mitigate the false classifications by incorporating neural network-based sarcasm detection. We define a simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) that incorpo- rates sarcasm detection in the final cyberbully classifications and demonstrate improvement over benchmark methods.

This paper describes our contribution to SemEval 2020 Task 8: Memotion Analysis. Our system learns multi-modal embeddings from text and images in order to classify Internet memes by sentiment. Our model learns text embeddings using BERT and extracts features from images with DenseNet, subsequently combining both features through concatenation. We also compare our results with those produced by DenseNet, ResNet, BERT, and BERT-ResNet. Our results show that image classification models have the potential to help classifying memes, with DenseNet outperforming ResNet. Adding text features is however not always helpful for Memotion Analysis.

Complex question answering (CQA) over raw text is a challenging task. A prominent approach to this task is based on the programmer-interpreter framework, where the programmer maps the question into a sequence of reasoning actions and the interpreter then executes these actions on the raw text. Learning an effective CQA model requires large amounts of human-annotated data, consisting of the ground-truth sequence of reasoning actions, which is time-consuming and expensive to collect at scale. In this paper, we address the challenge of learning a high-quality programmer (parser) by projecting natural human-generated questions into unnatural machine-generated questions which are more convenient to parse. We firstly generate synthetic (question, action sequence) pairs by a data generator, and train a semantic parser that associates synthetic questions with their corresponding action sequences. To capture the diversity when applied to natural questions, we learn a projection model to map natural questions into their most similar unnatural questions for which the parser can work well. Without any natural training data, our projection model provides high-quality action sequences for the CQA task. Experimental results show that the QA model trained exclusively with synthetic data outperforms its state-of-the-art counterpart trained on human-labeled data.