cantnlp@LT-EDI-2024: Automatic Detection of Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Speech in Under-resourced Languages

This paper describes our homophobia/transphobia in social media comments detection system developed as part of the shared task at LT-EDI-2024. We took a transformer-based approach to develop our multiclass classification model for ten language conditions (English, Spanish, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Tulu, and Telugu). We introduced synthetic and organic instances of script-switched language data during domain adaptation to mirror the linguistic realities of social media language as seen in the labelled training data. Our system ranked second for Gujarati and Telugu with varying levels of performance for other language conditions. The results suggest incorporating elements of paralinguistic behaviour such as script-switching may improve the performance of language detection systems especially in the cases of under-resourced languages conditions.

cantnlp@LT-EDI-2023: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments using Spatio-Temporally Retrained Language Models

This paper describes our multiclass classification system developed as part of the LTEDI@RANLP-2023 shared task. We used a BERT-based language model to detect homophobic and transphobic content in social media comments across five language conditions: English, Spanish, Hindi, Malayalam, and Tamil. We retrained a transformer-based crosslanguage pretrained language model, XLMRoBERTa, with spatially and temporally relevant social media language data. We also retrained a subset of models with simulated script-mixed social media language data with varied performance. We developed the best performing seven-label classification system for Malayalam based on weighted macro averaged F1 score (ranked first out of six) with variable performance for other language and class-label conditions. We found the inclusion of this spatio-temporal data improved the classification performance for all language and task conditions when compared with the baseline. The results suggests that transformer-based language classification systems are sensitive to register-specific and language-specific retraining.

Comparing Measures of Linguistic Diversity Across Social Media Language Data and Census Data at Subnational Geographic Areas

This paper describes a preliminary study on the comparative linguistic ecology of online spaces (i.e., social media language data) and real-world spaces in Aotearoa New Zealand (i.e., subnational administrative areas). We compare measures of linguistic diversity between these different spaces and discuss how social media users align with real-world populations. The results from the current study suggests that there is potential to use online social media language data to observe spatial and temporal changes in linguistic diversity at subnational geographic areas; however, further work is required to understand how well social media represents real-world behaviour.