LastResort at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Towards Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection using Pre-trained Transformer Based Model Ensembles

Abstract

This paper presents our solutions for Task4 at SemEval2022: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. This shared task contains two sub-tasks. The first sub-task is a binary classification task whose goal is to predict whether a given paragraph contains any form of patronising or condescending language(PCL). For the second sub-task, given a paragraph, we have to find which PCL categories express the condescension. Here we have a total of 7 overlapping sub-categories for PCL. Our proposed solution uses BERT based ensembled models with hard voting and techniques applied to take care of class imbalances. Our paper describes the system architecture of the submitted solution and other experiments that we conducted. Our best performing models achieve an F1 score of 59.4 and 15.7 on sub-tasks 1 and 2 respectively.