A Twitter BERT Approach for Offensive Language Detection in Marathi

Published in FIRE 2022 workshop, 2022

Recommended citation: Chavan, T., Patankar, S., Kane, A., Gokhale, O. and Joshi, R., 2022. A Twitter BERT Approach for Offensive Language Detection in Marathi. arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.10039. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10039

Automated offensive language detection is essential in combating the spread of hate speech, particularly in social media. This paper describes our work on Offensive Language Identification in low resource Indic language Marathi. The problem is formulated as a text classification task to identify a tweet as offensive or non-offensive. We evaluate different mono-lingual and multi-lingual BERT models on this classification task, focusing on BERT models pre-trained with social media datasets. We compare the performance of MuRIL, MahaTweetBERT, MahaTweetBERT-Hateful, and MahaBERT on the HASOC 2022 test set. We also explore external data augmentation from other existing Marathi hate speech corpus HASOC 2021 and L3Cube-MahaHate. The MahaTweetBERT, a BERT model, pre-trained on Marathi tweets when fine-tuned on the combined dataset (HASOC 2021 + HASOC 2022 + MahaHate), outperforms all models with an F1 score of 98.43 on the HASOC 2022 test set. With this, we also provide a new state-of-the-art result on HASOC 2022 / MOLD v2 test set.

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If you find our paper useful in your research, please consider citing:

@article{chavan2022twitter,
  title={A Twitter BERT Approach for Offensive Language Detection in Marathi},
  author={Chavan, Tanmay and Patankar, Shantanu and Kane, Aditya and Gokhale, Omkar and Joshi, Raviraj},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.10039},
  year={2022}
}