Youcef Benkhedda


2024

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AraTar: A Corpus to Support the Fine-grained Detection of Hate Speech Targets in the Arabic Language
Seham Alghamdi | Youcef Benkhedda | Basma Alharbi | Riza Batista-Navarro
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT) with Shared Tasks on Arabic LLMs Hallucination and Dialect to MSA Machine Translation @ LREC-COLING 2024

We are currently witnessing a concerning surge in the spread of hate speech across various social media platforms, targeting individuals or groups based on their protected characteristics such as race, religion, nationality and gender. This paper focuses on the detection of hate type (Task 1) and hate target (Task 2) in the Arabic language. To comprehensively address this problem, we have combined and re-annotated hate speech tweets from existing publicly available corpora, resulting in the creation of AraTar, the first and largest Arabic corpus annotated with support for multi-label classification for both hate speech types and target detection with a high inter-annotator agreement. Additionally, we sought to determine the most effective machine learning-based approach for addressing this issue. To achieve this, we compare and evaluate different approaches, including: (1) traditional machine learning-based models, (2) deep learning-based models fed with contextual embeddings, and (3) fine-tuning language models (LMs). Our results demonstrate that fine-tuning LMs, specifically using AraBERTv0.2-twitter (base), achieved the highest performance, with a micro-averaged F1-score of 84.5% and 85.03%, and a macro-averaged F1-score of 77.46% and 73.15%, for Tasks 1 and 2, respectively.

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Enriching the Metadata of Community-Generated Digital Content through Entity Linking: An Evaluative Comparison of State-of-the-Art Models
Youcef Benkhedda | Adrians Skapars | Viktor Schlegel | Goran Nenadic | Riza Batista-Navarro
Proceedings of the 8th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2024)

Digital archive collections that have been contributed by communities, known as community-generated digital content (CGDC), are important sources of historical and cultural knowledge. However, CGDC items are not easily searchable due to semantic information being obscured within their textual metadata. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art, general-domain entity linking (EL) models (i.e., BLINK, EPGEL and mGENRE) can map named entities mentioned in CGDC textual metadata, to Wikidata entities. We evaluate and compare their performance on an annotated dataset of CGDC textual metadata and provide some error analysis, in the way of informing future studies aimed at enriching CGDC metadata using entity linking methods.