Tesla at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection using Transformer-based Models with Data Augmentation

Abstract

This paper describes our system for Task 4 of SemEval 2022: Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) Detection. For sub-task 1, where the objective is to classify a text as PCL or non-PCL, we use a T5 Model finetuned on the dataset. For sub-task 2, which is a multi-label classification problem, we use a RoBERTa model fine-tuned on the dataset. Given that the key challenge in this task is classification on an imbalanced dataset, our models rely on an augmented dataset that we generate using paraphrasing. We found that these two models yield the best results out of all the other approaches we tried.