IITRoorkee@SMM4H 2024 Cross-Platform Age Detection in Twitter and Reddit Using Transformer-Based Model

AbstractThis paper outlines the methodology for the automatic extraction of self-reported ages from social media posts as part of the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2024 Workshop Shared Tasks. The focus was on Task 6: “Self-reported exact age classification with cross-platform evaluation in English.” The goal was to accurately identify age-related information from user-generated content, which is crucial for applications in public health monitoring, targeted advertising, and demographic research. A number of transformer-based models were employed, including RoBERTa-Base, BERT-Base, BiLSTM, and Flan T5 Base, leveraging their advanced capabilities in natural language understanding. The training strategies included fine-tuning foundational pre-trained language models and evaluating model performance using standard metrics: F1-score, Precision, and Recall. The experimental results demonstrated that the RoBERTa-Base model significantly outperformed the other models in this classification task. The best results achieved with the RoBERTa-Base model were an F1-score of 0.878, a Precision of 0.899, and a Recall of 0.858.