Dissecting Biases in Relation Extraction: A Cross-Dataset Analysis on People’s Gender and Origin

Relation Extraction (RE) is at the core of many Natural Language Understanding tasks, including knowledge-base population and Question Answering. However, any Natural Language Processing system is exposed to biases, and the analysis of these has not received much attention in RE. We propose a new method for inspecting bias in the RE pipeline, which is completely transparent in terms of interpretability. Specifically, in this work we analyze biases related to gender and place of birth. Our methodology includes (i) obtaining semantic triplets (subject, object, semantic relation) involving ‘person’ entities from RE resources, (ii) collecting meta-information (‘gender’ and ‘place of birth’) using Entity Linking technologies, and then (iii) analyze the distribution of triplets across different groups (e.g., men versus women). We investigate bias at two levels: In the training data of three commonly used RE datasets (SREDFM, CrossRE, NYT), and in the predictions of a state-of-the-art RE approach (ReLiK). To enable cross-dataset analysis, we introduce a taxonomy of relation types mapping the label sets of different RE datasets to a unified label space. Our findings reveal that bias is a compounded issue affecting underrepresented groups within data and predictions for RE

Hate speech annotation: Analysis of an Italian twitter corpus

The paper describes the development of a corpus from social media built with the aim of representing and analysing hate speech against some minority groups in Italy. The issues related to data collection and annotation are introduced, focusing on the challenges we addressed in designing a multifaceted set of labels where the main features of verbal hate expressions may be modelled. Moreover, an analysis of the disagreement among the annotators is presented in order to carry out a preliminary evaluation of the data set and the scheme.L’articolo descrive un corpus di testi estratti da social media costruito con il principale obiettivo di rappresentare ed analizzare il fenomeno dell’hate speech rivolto contro i migranti in Italia. Vengono introdotti gli aspetti significativi della raccolta ed annotazione dei dati, richiamando l’attenzione sulle sfide affrontate per progettare un insieme di etichette che rifletta le molte sfaccettature necessarie a cogliere e modellare le caratteristiche delle espressioni di odio. Inoltre viene presentata un’analisi del disagreement tra gli annotatori allo scopo di tentare una preliminare valutazione del corpus e dello schema di annotazione stesso

HaMor at the Profiling Hate Speech Spreaders on Twitter

n this paper we describe the Hate and Morality (HaMor) submission for the Profiling Hate Speech Spreaders on Twitter task at PAN 2021. We ranked as the 19th position - over 66 participating teams - according to the averaged accuracy value of 73% reached by our proposed models over the two languages. We obtained the 43th higher accuracy for English (62%) and the 2nd higher accuracy for Spanish (84%). We proposed four types of features for inferring users attitudes just from the text in their messages: HS detection, users morality, named entities, and communicative behaviour. The results of our experiments are promising and will lead to future investigations of these features in a finer grained perspective