United States

The detection of offensive, hateful content on social media is a challenging problem that affects many online users on a daily basis. Hateful content is often used to target a group of people based on ethnicity, gender, religion and other factors. The hate or contempt toward women has been increasing on social platforms. Misogynous content detection is especially challenging when textual and visual modalities are combined to form a single context, e.g., an overlay text embedded on top of an image, also known as meme. In this paper, we present a multimodal architecture that combines textual and visual features to detect misogynous memes. The proposed architecture is evaluated in the SemEval-2022 Task 5: MAMI - Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification challenge under the team name TIB-VA. We obtained the best result in the Task-B where the challenge is to classify whether a given document is misogynous and further identify the following sub-classes: shaming, stereotype, objectification, and violence.

NAACL 2022

TIB-VA at SemEval-2022 Task 5: A Multimodal Architecture for the Detection and Classification of Misogynous Memes

multimodal misogyny detection

misogyny detection

multimodal hate speech

hate speech detection

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

workshop paper

This paper describes the participation of team DUCS at SemEval 2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval - Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic. Team DUCS participated in SubTask A of iSarcasmEval which was to determine if the given English text was sarcastic or not. In this work, emojis were utilized to capture how they contributed to the sarcastic nature of a text. It is observed that emojis can augment or reverse the polarity of a given statement. Thus sentiment polarities and intensities of emojis, as well as those of text, were computed to determine sarcasm. Use of capitalization, word repetition, and use of punctuation marks like '!' were factored in as sentiment intensifiers. An NLP augmenter was used to tackle the imbalanced nature of the sarcasm dataset. Several architectures comprising of various ML and DL classifiers, and transformer models like BERT and Multimodal BERT were experimented with. It was observed that Multimodal BERT outperformed other architectures tested and achieved an F1-score of 30.71%. The key takeaway of this study was that sarcastic texts are usually positive sentences. In general emojis with positive polarity are used more than those with negative polarities in sarcastic texts.

DUCS at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Exploring Emojis and Sentiments for Sarcasm Detection

We present a system that creates pair-wise co- sine and arccosine sentence similarity matri- ces using multilingual sentence embeddings obtained from pre-trained SBERT and Universal Sentence Encoder models respectively. For each news article sentence, it searches the most similar sentence from the other article and com- putes an average score. Further, a convolutional neural network calculates a total similarity score for the article pairs on these matrices. Finally, a random forest regressor merges the previous results to a final score that can optionally be extended with a publishing date score.

WueDevils at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity via Pair-Wise Sentence Similarity Matrices

In this work, we introduce our system to the SemEval 2022 Task 11: Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER) competition. Our team (KDDIE) attempted the sub-task of Named Entity Recognition (NER) for the language of English in the challenge and reported our results. For this task, we use transfer learning method: fine-tuning the pre-trained language models (PLMs) on the competition dataset. Our two approaches are the BERT-based PLMs and PLMs with additional layer such as Condition Random Field. We report our finding and results in this report.

KDDIE at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Using DeBERTa for Named Entity Recognition

Described are our two entries "emukans" and "guntis" for the definition modeling track of CODWOE SemEval-2022 Task 1. Our ap- proach is based on careful scaling of a GRU re- current neural network, which exhibits double descent of errors, corresponding to significant improvements also per human judgement. Our results are in the middle of the ranking table per official automatic metrics.

RIGA at SemEval-2022 Task 1: Scaling Recurrent Neural Networks for CODWOE Dictionary Modeling

Memes have become quite common in day-to- day communications on social media platforms. They often appear to be amusing, evoking and attractive to audiences. However, some memes containing malicious content can be harmful to targeted groups. In this paper, we study misogynous meme detection, a shared task in SemEval 2022 - Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI). The challenge of misogynous meme detection is to co-represent multi-modal features. To tackle with this challenge, we propose a Multi-modal Multi-task Variational AutoEncoder (MMVAE) to learn an effective co- representation of visual and textual features in the latent space. Our goal is to automatically determine if a meme contains misogynous information and then identify its fine-grained category. Our model achieves F1 scores of 0.723 on the MAMI sub-task A and 0.634 on sub-task B. We carry out comprehensive experiments on our model’s architecture and show that our approach significantly outperforms several strong uni-modal and multi-modal approaches. Our code is released on github.

MMVAE at SemEval-2022 Task 5: A Multi-modal Multi-task VAE on Misogynous Meme Detection

Style transfer is the task of transferring a sentence into the target style while keeping its content. The major challenge is that parallel corpora are not available for various domains. In this paper, we propose a Mask-And-Regenerate approach (MAR). It learns from unpaired sentences by modifying the word-level style attributes. We cautiously integrate the deletion, insertion and substitution operations into our model. This enables our model to automatically apply different edit operations for different sentences. Specifically, we train a multilayer perceptron (MLP) as a style classifier to find out and mask style-characteristic words in the source inputs. Then we learn a language model on non-parallel data sets to score sentences and remove unnecessary masks. Finally, the masked source sentences are input to a Transformer to perform style transfer. The final results show that our proposed model exceeds baselines by about 2 per cent of accuracy for both sentiment and style transfer tasks with comparable or better content retention.

Mask and Regenerate: A Classifier-based Approach for Unpaired Sentiment Transformation of Reviews for Electronic Commerce Websites

In recent years, grey social media platforms, those with a loose moderation policy on cyberbullying, have been attracting more users. Recently, data collected from these types of platforms have been used to pre-train word embeddings (social-media-based), yet these word embeddings have not been investigated for social NLP related tasks. In this paper, we carried out a comparative study between social-media-based and non-social-media-based word embeddings on two social NLP tasks: Detecting cyberbullying and Measuring social bias. Our results show that using social-media-based word embeddings as input features, rather than non-social-media-based embeddings, leads to better cyberbullying detection performance. We also show that some word embeddings are more useful than others for categorizing offensive words. However, we do not find strong evidence that certain word embeddings will necessarily work best when identifying certain categories of cyberbullying within our datasets. Finally, We show even though most of the state-of-the-art bias metrics ranked social-media-based word embeddings as the most socially biased, these results remain inconclusive and further research is required.

A Comparative Study on Word Embeddings and Social NLP Tasks

We present a minimally supervised approach to identify human needs expressed in tweets. Taking inspiration from Frustration-Aggression theory, we trained RoBERTa model to classify tweets expressing frustration which serves as an indicator of unmet needs. Although the notion of frustration is highly subjective and complex, the findings support the use of pretrained language model in identifying tweets with unmet needs. Our study reveals the major causes behind feeling frustrated during the lockdown and the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Our proposed approach can be useful in timely identification and prioritization of emerging human needs in the event of a crisis.

IDENTIFYING HUMAN NEEDS THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA: A STUDY ON INDIAN CITIES DURING COVID-19

Over the past few years, there has been a growing concern around toxic positivity on social media which is a phenomenon where positivity is used to minimize one’s emotional experience. In this paper, we create a dataset for toxic positivity classification from Twitter and an inspirational quote website. We then perform benchmarking experiments using various text classification models and show the suitability of these models for the task. We achieved a macro F1 score of 0.71 and a weighted F1 score of 0.85 by using an ensemble model. To
the best of our knowledge, our dataset is the
first such dataset created.

Towards Toxic Positivity Detection

Social media platforms such as Twitter or Reddit have become an integral part in political opinion formation and discussions, accompanied by potential echo chamber forming. In this paper, we examine the relationships between the interaction patterns, the opinion polarity, and the socio-demographic characteristics in discussion communities on Reddit. On a dataset of over 2 million posts coming from over 20k users, we combine network community detection algorithms, reliable stance polarity annotations, and NLP- based socio-demographic estimations, to identify echo chambers and understand their properties at scale. We show that the separability of the interaction communities is more strongly correlated to the relative socio-demographic divide, rather than the stance polarity gap size. We further demonstrate that the socio-demographic classifiers have a strong topical bias and should be used with caution, merely for the relative community difference comparisons within a topic, rather than for any absolute labeling.

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DUCS at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Exploring Emojis and Sentiments for Sarcasm Detection

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Ensemble learning for identifying misogynous MEMEs