NLP-LTU at SemEval-2023 Task 10: The Impact of Data Augmentation and Semi-Supervised Learning Techniques on Text Classification Performance on an Imbalanced Dataset

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a methodology for task 10 of SemEval23, focusing on detecting and classifying online sexism in social media posts. The task is tackling a serious issue, as detecting harmful content on social media platforms is crucial for mitigating the harm of these posts on users. Our solution for this task is based on an ensemble of fine-tuned transformer-based models (BERTweet, RoBERTa, and DeBERTa). To alleviate problems related to class imbalance, and to improve the generalization capability of our model, we also experiment with data augmentation and semi-supervised learning. In particular, for data augmentation, we use back-translation, either on all classes, or on the underrepresented classes only. We analyze the impact of these strategies on the overall performance of the pipeline through extensive experiments. while for semi-supervised learning, we found that with a substantial amount of unlabelled, in-domain data available, semi-supervised learning can enhance the performance of certain models. Our proposed method (for which the source code is available on Github attains an F1-score of 0.8613 for sub-taskA, which ranked us 10th in the competition