Papers › bitsa_nlp@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Leveraging Pretrained Language Models for Detecting...

bitsa_nlp@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Leveraging Pretrained Language Models for Detecting Homophobia and Transphobia in Social Media Comments

27 Mar 2022LTEDI (ACL) 2022 5arXiv:2203.14267archive 2025-07-28

Vitthal Bhandari, Poonam Goyal

Online social networks are ubiquitous and user-friendly. Nevertheless, it is vital to detect and moderate offensive content to maintain decency and empathy. However, mining social media texts is a complex task since users don't adhere to any fixed patterns. Comments can be written in any combination of languages and many of them may be low-resource. In this paper, we present our system for the LT-EDI shared task on detecting homophobia and transphobia in social media comments. We experiment with a number of monolingual and multilingual transformer based models such as mBERT along with a data augmentation technique for tackling class imbalance. Such pretrained large models have recently shown tremendous success on a variety of benchmark tasks in natural language processing. We observe their performance on a carefully annotated, real life dataset of YouTube comments in English as well as Tamil. Our submission achieved ranks 9, 6 and 3 with a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.42, 0.64 and 0.58 in the English, Tamil and Tamil-English subtasks respectively. The code for the system has been open sourced.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

Code

vitthal-bhandari/homophobia-transphobia-detection officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Data Augmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

mBERT

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections