AStarTwice at SemEval-2021 Task 5: Toxic Span Detection Using RoBERTa-CRF, Domain Specific Pre-Training and Self-Training

AbstractThis paper describes our contribution to SemEval-2021 Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection. Our solution is built upon RoBERTa language model and Conditional Random Fields (CRF). We pre-trained RoBERTa on Civil Comments dataset, enabling it to create better contextual representation for this task. We also employed the semi-supervised learning technique of self-training, which allowed us to extend our training dataset. In addition to these, we also identified some pre-processing steps that significantly improved our F1 score. Our proposed system achieved a rank of 41 with an F1 score of 66.16%.