Ali Safaya,
Moutasem Abdullatif and
Deniz Yuret.
2020.
KUISAIL at SemEval-2020 Task 12: BERT-CNN for Offensive Speech Identification in Social Media. In
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pp
2054--2059,
Barcelona (online),
Dec.
International Committee for Computational Linguistics. [
ai.ku]
url abstract google scholar
In this paper, we describe our approach to utilize pre-trained BERT models with Convolutional Neural Networks for sub-task A of the Multilingual Offensive Language Identification shared task (OffensEval 2020), which is a part of the SemEval 2020. We show that combining CNN with BERT is better than using BERT on its own, and we emphasize the importance of utilizing pre-trained language models for downstream tasks. Our system, ranked 4th with macro averaged F1-Score of 0.897 in Arabic, 4th with score of 0.843 in Greek, and 3rd with score of 0.814 in Turkish. Additionally, we present ArabicBERT, a set of pre-trained transformer language models for Arabic that we share with the community.