LeaningTower@LT-EDI-ACL2022: When Hope and Hate Collide

AbstractThe 2022 edition of LT-EDI proposed two tasks in various languages. Task Hope Speech Detection required models for the automatic identification of hopeful comments for equality, diversity, and inclusion. Task Homophobia/Transphobia Detection focused on the identification of homophobic and transphobic comments. We targeted both tasks in English by using reinforced BERT-based approaches. Our core strategy aimed at exploiting the data available for each given task to augment the amount of supervised instances in the other. On the basis of an active learning process, we trained a model on the dataset for Task i and applied it to the dataset for Task j to iteratively integrate new silver data for Task i. Our official submissions to the shared task obtained a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.53 for Hope Speech and 0.46 for Homo/Transphobia, placing our team in the third and fourth positions out of 11 and 12 participating teams respectively.