ASRtrans at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Ensemble of Tuned Transformer-based Models for PCL Detection

Patronizing behavior is a subtle form of bullying and when directed towards vulnerable communities, it can arise inequalities. This paper describes our system for Task 4 of SemEval-2022: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection (PCL). We participated in both the sub-tasks and conducted extensive experiments to analyze the effects of data augmentation and loss functions used, to tackle the problem of class imbalance. We explore whether large transformer-based models can capture the intricacies associated with PCL detection. Our solution consists of an ensemble of the RoBERTa model which is further trained on external data and other language models such as XLNeT, Ernie-2.0, and BERT. We also present the results of several problem transformation techniques such as Classifier Chains, Label Powerset, and Binary relevance for multi-label classification.