UMUTeam at EXIST 2021: Sexist Language Identification based on Linguistic Features and Transformers in Spanish and English

Abstract

Sexism is harmful behaviour that can make women feel worthless promoting self-censorship and gender inequality. In the digital era, misogynists have found in social networks a place in which they can spread their oppressive discourse towards women. Although this particular form of oppressive speech is banned and punished on most social networks, its identification is quite challenging due to the large number of messages posted everyday. Moreover, sexist comments can be unnoticed as condescends or friendly statements which hinders its identification even for humans. With the aim of improving automatic sexist identification on social networks, we participate in EXIST-2021. This shared task involves the identification and categorisation of sexism language on Spanish and English documents compiled from micro-blogging platforms. Specifically, two tasks were proposed, one concerning a binary classification of sexism utterances and another regarding multi-class identification of sexist traits. Our proposal for solving both tasks is grounded on the combination of linguistic features and state-of-the-art transformers by means of ensembles and multi-input neural networks. To address the multi-language problem, we tackle the problem independently by language to put the results together at the end. Our best result was achieved in task 1 with an accuracy of 75.14% and 61.70% for task 2.