# UMass PCL at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Pre-trained Language Model Ensembles for Detecting Patronizing and Condescending Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08304 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08304/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
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- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [A Survey of Data Augmentation Approaches for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03075/) (2021)
- [Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03891/) (2019)
- [On the Stability of Fine-tuning BERT: Misconceptions, Explanations, and Strong Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04884/) (2020)
- [Sentence Encoders on STILTs: Supplementary Training on Intermediate Labeled-data Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01088/) (2018)
- [SemEval-2019 Task 6: Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media (OffensEval)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08983/) (2019)
- [AMMUS : A Survey of Transformer-based Pretrained Models in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05542/) (2021)
- [Exploring and Predicting Transferability across NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00770/) (2020)
- [TalkDown: A Corpus for Condescension Detection in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11272/) (2019)
- [Don't Patronize Me! An Annotated Dataset with Patronizing and Condescending Language towards Vulnerable Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08320/) (2020)
- [HBert + BiasCorp -- Fighting Racism on the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02242/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) is everywhere, but rarely is the focus on its use by media towards vulnerable communities. Accurately detecting PCL of this form is a difficult task due to limited labeled data and how subtle it can be. In this paper, we describe our system for detecting such language which was submitted to SemEval 2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. Our approach uses an ensemble of pre-trained language models, data augmentation, and optimizing the threshold for detection. Experimental results on the evaluation dataset released by the competition hosts show that our work is reliably able to detect PCL, achieving an F1 score of 55.47% on the binary classification task and a macro F1 score of 36.25% on the fine-grained, multi-label detection task.