We introduce HateBERT, a re-trained BERT model for abusive language detection in English. The model was trained on RAL-E, a large-scale dataset of Reddit comments in English from communities banned for being offensive, abusive, or hateful that we have curated and made available to the public. We present the results of a detailed comparison between a general pre-trained language model and the retrained version on three English datasets for offensive, abusive language and hate speech detection tasks. In all datasets, HateBERT outperforms the corresponding general BERT model. We also discuss a battery of experiments comparing the portability of the fine-tuned models across the datasets, suggesting that portability is affected by compatibility of the annotated phenomena.

We introduce an approach to multilingual Offensive Language Detection based on the mBERT transformer model. We download extra training data from Twitter in English, Danish, and Turkish, and use it to re-train the model. We then fine-tuned the model on the provided training data and, in some configurations, implement transfer learning approach exploiting the typological relatedness between English and Danish. Our systems obtained good results across the three languages (.9036 for EN, .7619 for DA, and .7789 for TR).

This paper describes a neural network (NN) model that was used for participating in the OffensEval, Task 12 of the SemEval 2020 workshop. The aim of this task is to identify offensive speech in social media, particularly in tweets. The model we used, C-BiGRU, is composed of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) along with a bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). A multidimensional numerical representation (embedding) for each of the words in the tweets that were used by the model were determined using fastText. This allowed for using a dataset of labeled tweets to train the model on detecting combinations of words that may convey an offensive meaning. This model was used in the sub-task A of the English, Turkish and Danish competitions of the workshop, achieving F1 scores of 90.88%, 76.76% and 76.70%, respectively.

In this paper, we introduce our submission for the SemEval Task 12, sub-tasks A and B for offensive language identification and categorization in English tweets. This year the data set for Task A is significantly larger than in the previous year. Therefore, we have adapted the BlazingText algorithm to extract embedding representation and classify texts after filtering and sanitizing the dataset according to the conventional text patterns on social media. We have gained both advantages of a speedy training process and obtained a good F1 score of 90.88% on the test set. For sub-task B, we opted to fine-tune a Bidirectional Encoder Representation from a Transformer (BERT) to accommodate the limited data for categorizing offensive tweets. We have achieved an F1 score of only 56.86%, but after experimenting with various label assignment thresholds in the pre-processing steps, the F1 score improved to 64%.

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) provides generic guidelines for the evaluation of language proficiency. Nevertheless, for automated proficiency classification systems, different approaches for different languages are proposed. Our paper evaluates and extends the results of an approach to Automatic Essay Scoring proposed as a part of the REPROLANG 2020 challenge. We provide a comparison between our results and the ones from the published paper and we include a new corpus for the English language for further experiments. Our results are lower than the expected ones when using the same approach and the system does not scale well with the added English corpus.

Abusive language detection is an unsolved and challenging problem for the NLP community. Recent literature suggests various approaches to distinguish between different language phenomena (e.g., hate speech vs. cyberbullying vs. offensive language) and factors (degree of explicitness and target) that may help to classify different abusive language phenomena. There are data sets that annotate the target of abusive messages (i.e.OLID/OffensEval (Zampieri et al., 2019a)). However, there is a lack of data sets that take into account the degree of explicitness. In this paper, we propose annotation guidelines to distinguish between explicit and implicit abuse in English and apply them to OLID/OffensEval. The outcome is a newly created resource, AbuseEval v1.0, which aims to address some of the existing issues in the annotation of offensive and abusive language (e.g., explicitness of the message, presence of a target, need of context, and interaction across different phenomena).

This paper presents our submission for the SemEval shared task 6, sub-task A on the identification of offensive language. Our proposed model, C-BiGRU, combines a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). We utilize word2vec to capture the semantic similarities between words. This composition allows us to extract long term dependencies in tweets and distinguish between offensive and non-offensive tweets. In addition, we evaluate our approach on a different dataset and show that our model is capable of detecting online aggressiveness in both English and German tweets. Our model achieved a macro F1-score of 79.40% on the SemEval dataset.