MUM at ComMA@ICON: Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification Using Supervised Learning Approaches

Due to the rapid rise of social networks and micro-blogging websites, communication between people from different religion, caste, creed, cultural and psychological backgrounds has become more direct leading to the increase in cyber conflicts between people. This in turn has given rise to more and more hate speech and usage of abusive words to the point that it has become a serious problem creating negative impacts on the society. As a result, it is imperative to identify and filter such content on social media to prevent its further spread and the damage it is going to cause. Further, filtering such huge data requires automated tools since doing it manually is labor intensive and error prone. Added to this is the complex code-mixed and multi-scripted nature of social media text. To address the challenges of abusive content detection on social media, in this paper, we, team MUM, propose Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models submitted to Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification (ComMA@ICON) shared task at International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON) 2021. Word uni-grams, char n-grams, and emoji vectors are combined as features to train a ML Elastic-net regression model and multi-lingual Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (mBERT) is fine-tuned for a DL model. Out of the two, fine-tuned mBERT model performed better with an instance-F1 score of 0.326, 0.390, 0.343, 0.359 for Meitei, Bangla, Hindi, Multilingual texts respectively.