Fatima Zahra Qachfar


2024

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DetectiveReDASers at HSD-2Lang 2024: A New Pooling Strategy with Cross-lingual Augmentation and Ensembling for Hate Speech Detection in Low-resource Languages
Fatima Zahra Qachfar | Bryan Tuck | Rakesh Verma
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2024)

This paper addresses hate speech detection in Turkish and Arabic tweets, contributing to the HSD-2Lang Shared Task. We propose a specialized pooling strategy within a soft-voting ensemble framework to improve classification in Turkish and Arabic language models. Our approach also includes expanding the training sets through cross-lingual translation, introducing a broader spectrum of hate speech examples. Our method attains F1-Macro scores of 0.6964 for Turkish (Subtask A) and 0.7123 for Arabic (Subtask B). While achieving these results, we also consider the computational overhead, striking a balance between the effectiveness of our unique pooling strategy, data augmentation, and soft-voting ensemble. This approach advances the practical application of language models in low-resource languages for hate speech detection.

2023

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ReDASPersuasion at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Persuasion Detection using Multilingual Transformers and Language Agnostic Features
Fatima Zahra Qachfar | Rakesh Verma
Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)

This paper describes a multilingual persuasion detection system that incorporates persuasion technique attributes for a multi-label classification task. The proposed method has two advantages. First, it combines persuasion features with a sequence classification transformer to classify persuasion techniques. Second, it is a language agnostic approach that supports a total of 100 languages, guaranteed by the multilingual transformer module and the Google translator interface. We found that our persuasion system outperformed the SemEval baseline in all languages except zero shot prediction languages, which did not constitute the main focus of our research. With the highest F1-Micro score of 0.45, Italian achieved the eighth position on the leaderboard.