Team_Syrax at BLP-2023 Task 1: Data Augmentation and Ensemble Based Approach for Violence Inciting Text Detection in Bangla

AbstractThis paper describes our participation in Task1 (VITD) of BLP Workshop 1 at EMNLP 2023,focused on the detection and categorizationof threats linked to violence, which could po-tentially encourage more violent actions. Ourapproach involves fine-tuning of pre-trainedtransformer models and employing techniqueslike self-training with external data, data aug-mentation through back-translation, and en-semble learning (bagging and majority voting).Notably, self-training improves performancewhen applied to data from external source butnot when applied to the test-set. Our anal-ysis highlights the effectiveness of ensemblemethods and data augmentation techniques inBangla Text Classification. Our system ini-tially scored 0.70450 and ranked 19th amongthe participants but post-competition experi-ments boosted our score to 0.72740.