Abstract:We present ToxSyn-PT, the first large-scale Portuguese corpus that enables fine-grained hate-speech classification across nine legally protected minority groups. The dataset contains 53,274 synthetic sentences equally distributed between minorities groups and toxicity labels. ToxSyn-PT is created through a novel four-stage pipeline: (1) a compact, manually curated seed; (2) few-shot expansion with an instruction-tuned LLM; (3) paraphrase-based augmentation; and (4) enrichment, plus additional neutral texts to curb overfitting to group-specific cues. The resulting corpus is class-balanced, stylistically diverse, and free from the social-media domain that dominate existing Portuguese datasets. Despite domain differences with traditional benchmarks, experiments on both binary and multi-label classification on the corpus yields strong results across five public Portuguese hate-speech datasets, demonstrating robust generalization even across domain boundaries. The dataset is publicly released to advance research on synthetic data and hate-speech detection in low-resource settings.
Abstract:Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a task whose objective is to classify the individual sentiment polarity of all entities, called aspects, in a sentence. The task is composed of two subtasks: Aspect Term Extraction (ATE), identify all aspect terms in a sentence; and Sentiment Orientation Extraction (SOE), given a sentence and its aspect terms, the task is to determine the sentiment polarity of each aspect term (positive, negative or neutral). This article presents we present our participation in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis in Portuguese (ABSAPT) 2022 at IberLEF 2022. We submitted the best performing systems, achieving new state-of-the-art results on both subtasks.