ULFRI at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Leveraging uncertainty and additional knowledge for patronizing and condescending language detection

AbstractWe describe the ULFRI system used in the Subtask 1 of SemEval-2022 Task 4 Patronizing and condescending language detection. Our models are based on the RoBERTa model, modified in two ways: (1) by injecting additional knowledge (coreferences, named entities, dependency relations, and sentiment) and (2) by leveraging the task uncertainty by using soft labels, Monte Carlo dropout, and threshold optimization. We find that the injection of additional knowledge is not helpful but the uncertainty management mechanisms lead to small but consistent improvements. Our final system based on these findings achieves F1 = 0.575 in the online evaluation, ranking 19th out of 78 systems.