NIT_Agartala_NLP_Team at SemEval-2019 Task 6: An Ensemble Approach to Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Twitter Social Media Corpora

Abstract

The paper describes the systems submitted to OffensEval (SemEval 2019, Task 6) on ‘Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media’ by the ‘NIT_Agartala_NLP_Team’. A Twitter annotated dataset of 13,240 English tweets was provided by the task organizers to train the individual models, with the best results obtained using an ensemble model composed of six different classifiers. The ensemble model produced macro-averaged F1-scores of 0.7434, 0.7078 and 0.4853 on Subtasks A, B, and C, respectively. The paper highlights the overall low predictive nature of various linguistic features and surface level count features, as well as the limitations of a traditional machine learning approach when compared to a Deep Learning counterpart.