HAD-Tübingen at SemEval-2019 task 6: Deep learning analysis of offensive language on twitter: Identification and categorization

Abstract

This paper describes the submissions of our team, HAD-Tübingen, for the SemEval 2019 - Task 6: “OffensEval: Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media”. We participated in all the three sub-tasks: Sub-task A - “Offensive language identification”, sub-task B - “Automatic categorization of offense types” and sub-task C - “Offense target identification”. As a baseline model we used a Long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM) to identify and categorize offensive tweets. For all the tasks we experimented with external databases in a postprocessing step to enhance the results made by our model. The best macro-average F1 scores obtained for the sub-tasks A, B and C are 0.73, 0.52, and 0.37, respectively.