An Evaluation of Multilingual Offensive Language Identification Methods for the Languages of India

Abstract

The pervasiveness of offensive content in social media has become an important reason for concern for online platforms. With the aim of improving online safety, a large number of studies applying computational models to identify such content have been published in the last few years, with promising results. The majority of these studies, however, deal with high-resource languages such as English due to the availability of datasets in these languages. Recent work has addressed offensive language identification from a low-resource perspective, exploring data augmentation strategies and trying to take advantage of existing multilingual pretrained models to cope with data scarcity in low-resource scenarios. In this work, we revisit the problem of low-resource offensive language identification by evaluating the performance of multilingual transformers in offensive language identification for languages spoken in India. We investigate languages from different families such as Indo-Aryan (e.g., Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu) and Dravidian (e.g., Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada), creating important new technology for these languages. The results show that multilingual offensive language identification models perform better than monolingual models and that cross-lingual transformers show strong zero-shot and few-shot performance across languages.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/info12080306
Additional Information: : © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
Publication ISSN: 2078-2489
Last Modified: 07 Oct 2024 07:42
Date Deposited: 24 Jan 2023 17:07
Full Text Link: https://www.len ... 459-431-541-040
Related URLs: https://www.mdp ... 8-2489/12/8/306 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2021-07-29
Accepted Date: 2021-07-23
Authors: Ranasinghe, Tharindu (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-3207-3821)
Zampieri, Marcos

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