Abstract
The swift surge of digital communication on social media platforms has brought about an increase in hate speech online, especially sexism. Such content can have devastating effects on the psychological well-being of the users, and it becomes imperative to design automated systems that can identify and flag such harmful content. Human moderation alone is inadequate to manage the volume of content, necessitating efficient technological solutions. In this study, we explore the performance of different modern techniques on Bert-based models for detecting sexist text. We explore four such techniques, namely, Domain Adaptive Pre-training (DAP), Learning Rate Scheduling (LeR), Data Augmentation (DAug), and an ensemble of all three. The results show that each technique improves performance differently on each task due to their different approaches, which may be suited to a certain problem more. The ensemble model performs the best in all three subtasks. These models are trained on a Semeval’23 shared task dataset, which includes both sexist and non-sexist texts. All in all, this study explores the potential of DAP-LeR-DAug techniques in detecting sexist content. The results of this study highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the three different techniques with respect to each subtask. The results of this study will be useful for researchers and developers interested in developing systems for identifying and flagging online hate speech.
