Sidney Wong

Sidney G. -J. Wong, Matthew Durward, Benjamin Adams et al.

This paper describes our multiclass classification system developed as part of the LTEDI@RANLP-2023 shared task. We used a BERT-based language model to detect homophobic and transphobic content in social media comments across five language conditions: English, Spanish, Hindi, Malayalam, and Tamil. We retrained a transformer-based crosslanguage pretrained language model, XLMRoBERTa, with spatially and temporally relevant social media language data. We also retrained a subset of models with simulated script-mixed social media language data with varied performance. We developed the best performing seven-label classification system for Malayalam based on weighted macro averaged F1 score (ranked first out of six) with variable performance for other language and class-label conditions. We found the inclusion of this spatio-temporal data improved the classification performance for all language and task conditions when compared with the baseline. The results suggests that transformer-based language classification systems are sensitive to register-specific and language-specific retraining.

Jonathan Dunn, Sidney Wong

This paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification produces robust dialect models, we do not know what influence both changing grammars and changing populations have on dialect models. This paper constructs a test set for 12 dialects of English that spans three years at monthly intervals with a fixed spatial distribution across 1,120 cities. Syntactic representations are formulated within the usage-based Construction Grammar paradigm (CxG). The decay rate of classification performance for each dialect over time allows us to identify regions undergoing syntactic change. And the distribution of classification accuracy within dialect regions allows us to identify the degree to which the grammar of a dialect is internally heterogeneous. The main contribution of this paper is to show that a rigorous evaluation of dialect classification models can be used to find both variation over space and change over time.

Sidney G. -J. Wong, Jonathan Dunn, Benjamin Adams

This paper describes a preliminary study on the comparative linguistic ecology of online spaces (i.e., social media language data) and real-world spaces in Aotearoa New Zealand (i.e., subnational administrative areas). We compare measures of linguistic diversity between these different spaces and discuss how social media users align with real-world populations. The results from the current study suggests that there is potential to use online social media language data to observe spatial and temporal changes in linguistic diversity at subnational geographic areas; however, further work is required to understand how well social media represents real-world behaviour.

Sidney G. -J. Wong

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the influence of sociocultural factors (i.e., social, cultural, and political) in the development of hate speech detection systems. We set out to investigate the suitability of using open-source training data to monitor levels of anti-LGBTQ+ content on social media across different national-varieties of English. Our findings suggests the social and cultural alignment of open-source hate speech data sets influences the predicted outputs. Furthermore, the keyword-search approach of anti-LGBTQ+ slurs in the development of open-source training data encourages detection models to overfit on slurs; therefore, anti-LGBTQ+ content may go undetected. We recommend combining empirical outputs with qualitative insights to ensure these systems are fit for purpose.

Sidney Gig-Jan Wong

While NLP research into hate speech detection has grown exponentially in the last three decades, there has been minimal uptake or engagement from policy makers and non-profit organisations. We argue the absence of ethical frameworks have contributed to this rift between current practice and best practice. By adopting appropriate ethical frameworks, NLP researchers may enable the social impact potential of hate speech research. This position paper is informed by reviewing forty-eight hate speech detection systems associated with thirty-seven publications from different venues.

Sidney G. -J. Wong, Matthew Durward

This paper describes our homophobia/transphobia in social media comments detection system developed as part of the shared task at LT-EDI-2024. We took a transformer-based approach to develop our multiclass classification model for ten language conditions (English, Spanish, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Tulu, and Telugu). We introduced synthetic and organic instances of script-switched language data during domain adaptation to mirror the linguistic realities of social media language as seen in the labelled training data. Our system ranked second for Gujarati and Telugu with varying levels of performance for other language conditions. The results suggest incorporating elements of paralinguistic behaviour such as script-switching may improve the performance of language detection systems especially in the cases of under-resourced languages conditions.