Offensive Language Identification in Greek

As offensive language has become a rising issue for online communities and social media platforms, researchers have been investigating ways of coping with abusive content and developing systems to detect its different types: cyberbullying, hate speech, aggression, etc. With a few notable exceptions, most research on this topic so far has dealt with English. This is mostly due to the availability of language resources for English. To address this shortcoming, this paper presents the first Greek annotated dataset for offensive language identification: the Offensive Greek Tweet Dataset (OGTD). OGTD is a manually annotated dataset containing 4,779 posts from Twitter annotated as offensive and not offensive. Along with a detailed description of the dataset, we evaluate several computational models trained and tested on this data.Comment: Accepted to LREC 202

FBK-DH at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Using Multi-channel BERT for Multilingual Offensive Language Detection

In this paper we present our submission to sub-task A at SemEval 2020 Task 12: Multilingual Offensive Language Identification in Social Media (OffensEval2). For Danish, Turkish, Arabic and Greek, we develop an architecture based on transfer learning and relying on a two-channel BERT model, in which the English BERT and the multilingual one are combined after creating a machine-translated parallel corpus for each language in the task. For English, instead, we adopt a more standard, single-channel approach. We find that, in a multilingual scenario, with some languages having small training data, using parallel BERT models with machine translated data can give systems more stability, especially when dealing with noisy data. The fact that machine translation on social media data may not be perfect does not hurt the overall classification performance

LT@Helsinki at SemEval-2020 Task 12 : Multilingual or language-specific BERT?

This paper presents the different models submitted by the LT@Helsinki team for the SemEval2020 Shared Task 12. Our team participated in sub-tasks A and C; titled offensive language identification and offense target identification, respectively. In both cases we used the so called Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT), a model pre-trained by Google and fine-tuned by us on the OLID dataset. The results show that offensive tweet classification is one of several language-based tasks where BERT can achieve state-of-the-art results.Peer reviewe