NLP-LTU at SemEval-2023 Task 10: The Impact of Data Augmentation and Semi-Supervised Learning Techniques on Text Classification Performance on an Imbalanced Dataset

Sana Al-Azzawi, György Kovács, Filip Nilsson, Tosin Adewumi, Marcus Liwicki

The 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023) Task 10: towards explainable detection of online sexism Paper

TLDR: In this paper, we propose a methodology fortask 10 of SemEval23, focusing on detectingand classifying online sexism in social me-dia posts. The task is tackling a serious is-sue, as detecting harmful content on socialmedia platforms is crucial for mitigating theharm of these posts on users. Our solu
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Abstract: In this paper, we propose a methodology fortask 10 of SemEval23, focusing on detectingand classifying online sexism in social me-dia posts. The task is tackling a serious is-sue, as detecting harmful content on socialmedia platforms is crucial for mitigating theharm of these posts on users. Our solutionfor this task is based on an ensemble of fine-tuned transformer-based models (BERTweet,RoBERTa, and DeBERTa). To alleviate prob-lems related to class imbalance, and to improvethe generalization capability of our model, wealso experiment with data augmentation andsemi-supervised learning. In particular, fordata augmentation, we use back-translation, ei-ther on all classes, or on the underrepresentedclasses only. We analyze the impact of thesestrategies on the overall performance of thepipeline through extensive experiments. whilefor semi-supervised learning, we found thatwith a substantial amount of unlabelled, in-domain data available, semi-supervised learn-ing can enhance the performance of certainmodels. Our proposed method (for which thesource code is available on Github12) attainsan F 1-score of 0.8613 for sub-taskA, whichranked us 10th in the competition.