Ireland

The 2022 edition of LT-EDI proposed two tasks in various languages. Task Hope Speech Detection required models for the automatic identification of hopeful comments for equality, diversity, and inclusion. Task Homophobia/Transphobia Detection focused on the identification of homophobic and transphobic comments. We targeted both tasks in English by using reinforced BERT-based approaches. Our core strategy aimed at exploiting the data available for each given task to augment the amount of supervised instances in the other. On the basis of an active learning process, we trained a model on the dataset for Task~i and applied it to the dataset for Task~j to iteratively integrate new silver data for Task~i. Our official submissions to the shared task obtained a macro-averaged F1_score of 0.53 for Task_hope and 0.46 for Task_antiLGBT, placing our team in the third and fourth positions out of 11 and 12 participating teams respectively.

ACL 2022

When Hope and Hate Collide

data augmentation

transformers

active learning

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

workshop paper

A person feeling unimportant, useless, or unhappy may be a sign of depression. Depression is one of the most severe mental health conditions which may be unnoticed, undiagnosed and untreated in many cases. People worldwide suffer from depression and the affected person may operate poorly at work, studies, and in the community.
Knowingly or unknowingly the behavior of a person will be reflected in the comments she/he posts on social media. Social media users who are usually in depression try to seek the attention and sympathy of others by posting negative and disturbing messages or requesting help.
However, as analyzing the increasing amount of social media data manually in laborious and error-prone, automated tools have to be developed for the same.
To address the issue of detecting the sign of depression content on social media, in this paper, we - team MUCS, describe an Ensemble of Machine Learning (ML) models and a Transfer Learning (TL) model submitted to "Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text-LT-EDI@ACL 2022" (DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022) shared task at Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2022.

Detecting Sign of Depression from Social Media Text using Supervised Learning Approach

Social media is considered as a platform where users express themselves. The rise of social media as one of humanity’s most important public communication platforms presents a potential prospect for early identification and management of mental illness. Depression is one such illness that can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems. It is necessary to measure the level of depression from the social media text to treat them and to avoid the negative consequences. Detecting levels of depression is a challenging task since it involves the mindset of the people, which can change periodically. The aim of the DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022 shared task is to classify the social media text into three levels of depression namely “Not Depressed”, “Moderately Depressed”, and “Severely Depressed”. This overview presents a description of the task, the data set, methodologies used and an analysis on the results of the submissions. The models that were submitted as a part of the shared task had used a variety of technologies from traditional machine learning algorithms to deep learning models. It could be observed from the result that the transformer based models have outperformed the other models. Among the 32 teams who had submitted their results for the shared task, the best macro F1-score of 0.583 was obtained using a transformer based model.

Findings of the Shared Task on Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media

This paper illustrates the overview of the shared
task on automatic speech recognition in the
Tamil language. In the shared task, spontaneous
Tamil speech data gathered from elderly
and transgender people was given for recognition
and evaluation. These utterances were collected
from people when they communicated
in the public locations such as hospitals, markets,
vegetable shop, etc. The speech corpus
includes utterances of male, female, and transgender
and was split into training and testing
data. The given task was evaluated using WER
(Word Error Rate). The participants used the
transformer-based model for automatic speech
recognition. Different results using different
pre-trained transformer models are discussed
in this overview paper.

Findings of the Shared Task on Speech Recognition for Vulnerable Individuals in Tamil

Social media platforms have been provoking masses of people. The individual comments affect a prevalent way of thinking by moving away from preoccupation with discrimination, loneliness, or influence in building confidence, support, and good qualities. This paper aims to identify hope in these social media posts. Hope significantly impacts the well-being of people, as suggested by health professionals. It reflects the belief to achieve an objective, discovers a new path, or become motivated to formulate pathways.
In this paper we classify given a social media post, hope speech or not hope speech, using ensembled voting of BERT, ERNIE 2.0 and RoBERTa for English language with 0.54 macro F1-score ($2^{st}$ rank). For non-English languages Malayalam, Spanish and Tamil we utilized XLM RoBERTA with 0.50, 0.81, 0.3 macro F1 score ($1^{st}$, $1^{st}$,$3^{rd}$ rank) respectively. For Kannada, we use Multilingual BERT with 0.32 F1 score($5^{th}$)position. We release our code-base here https://github.com/Muskaan-Singh/Hate-Speech-detection.git.

Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

The increased expansion of abusive content on social media platforms negatively affects online users. Transphobic/homophobic content indicates hatred comments for lesbian, gay, transgender, or bisexual people. It leads to offensive speech and causes severe social problems that can make online platforms toxic and unpleasant to LGBT+people, endeavoring to eliminate equality, diversity, and inclusion. 
In this paper, we present our classification system; given comments, it predicts whether or not it contains any form of homophobia/transphobia with a Zero-Shot learning framework. Our system submission achieved 0.40, 0.85, 0.89 F1-score for Tamil and Tamil-English, English with ($1^{st}$, $1^{st}$,$8^{th}$) ranks respectively. We release our codebase here https://github.com/Muskaan-Singh/Homophobia-and-Transphobia-ACL-Submission.git.

Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in social media comments

Depression is a common illness involving sadness and lack of interest in all day-to-day activities. It is important to detect depression at an early stage as it is treated at an early stage to avoid consequences. In this paper, we present our system submission for DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022. We aim to detect the signs of depression of a person from their social media postings wherein people share their feelings and emotions. The proposed system is an ensembled voting model with fine-tuned BERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet. Given social media postings in English, the submitted system classify the signs of depression into three labels, namely “not depressed,” “moderately depressed,” and “severely depressed.” Our best model is ranked $3^{rd}$ position with 0.54\% accuracy . We make our codebase accessible here https://github.com/Muskaan-Singh/Depression-Detection.git.

Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text

Homophobia and Transphobia Detection is the task of identifying homophobia, transphobia, and non-anti-LGBT+ content from the given corpus. Homophobia and transphobia are both toxic languages directed at LGBTQ+ individuals that are described as hate speech. This paper summarizes our findings on the "Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in social media comments" shared task held at LT-EDI 2022 - ACL 2022. This shared task focused on three sub-tasks for Tamil, English, and Tamil-English (code-mixed) languages. It received 10 systems for Tamil, 13 systems for English, and 11 systems for Tamil-English. The best systems for Tamil, English, and Tamil-English scored 0.570, 0.870, and 0.610, respectively, on average macro F1-score.

Overview of The Shared Task on Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments

Hope Speech detection is the task of classifying a sentence as hope speech or non-hope speech given a corpus of sentences. Hope speech is any message or content that is positive, encouraging, reassuring, inclusive, and supportive that in- spires and engenders optimism in the minds of people. In contrast to identifying and censoring
negative speech patterns, hope speech detection focused on recognizing and promoting positive speech patterns online. In this paper, we report an overview of the findings and results from the shared task on hope speech detection for Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, English, and Spanish languages conducted at the second workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (LT-EDI-2022), organized as a part of ACL 2022. The participants were provided with annotated training & development datasets and unlabelled test datasets in all five
languages. The goal of the shared task is to classify the given sentences into one of the two hope speech classes (Hope speech, Non-hope speech). A total of 126 participants registered for the shared task and 14 teams finally submitted their results. The performance of the systems submitted was evaluated in terms of
micro-F1 score and weighted-F1 score. The datasets for this challenge are openly available on the competition website.

Overview of the Shared Task on Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion

Recently, detection and categorization of undesired (e. g., aggressive, abusive, offensive, hate) content from online platforms has grabbed the attention of researchers because of its detrimental impact on society. Several attempts have been made to mitigate the usage and propagation of such content. However, most past studies were conducted primarily for English, where low-resource languages like Bengali remained out of the focus. Therefore, to facilitate research in this arena, this paper introduces a novel multilabel Bengali dataset (named M-BAD) containing 15650 texts to detect aggressive texts and their targets. Each text of M-BAD went through rigorous two-level annotations. At the primary level, each text is labelled as either aggressive or non-aggressive. In the secondary level, the aggressive texts have been further annotated into five fine-grained target classes: religion, politics, verbal, gender and race. Baseline experiments are carried out with different machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and transformer models, where Bangla-BERT acquired the highest weighted f_1-score in both detection (0.92) and target identification (0.83) tasks. Error analysis of the models exhibits the difficulty to identify context-dependent aggression, and this work argues that further research is required to address these issues.

M-BAD: A Multilabel Dataset for Detecting Aggressive Texts and Their Targets

This study investigates how fake news uses a thumbnail for a news article with a focus on whether a news article’s thumbnail represents the news content correctly. A news article shared with an irrelevant thumbnail can mislead readers into having a wrong impression of the issue, especially in social media environments where users are less likely to click the link and consume the entire content. We propose to capture the degree of semantic incongruity in the multimodal relation by using the pretrained CLIP representation. From a source-level analysis, we found that fake
news employs a more incongruous image to the main content than general news. Going further, we attempted to detect news articles with image-text incongruity. Evaluation experiments suggest that CLIP-based methods can successfully detect news articles in which the thumbnail is semantically irrelevant to news text. This study contributes to the research by providing a novel view on tackling online fake
news and misinformation. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/s
su-humane/fake-news-thumbnail.

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Detecting Sign of Depression from Social Media Text using Supervised Learning Approach

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Ensemble Modeling for Homophobia and Transphobia Detection