Atalaya at SemEval 2019 Task 5: Robust Embeddings for Tweet Classification

In this article, we describe our participation in HatEval, a shared task aimed at the detection of hate speech against immigrants and women. We focused on Spanish subtasks, building from our previous experiences on sentiment analysis in this language. We trained linear classifiers and Recurrent Neural Networks, using classic features, such as bagof-words, bag-of-characters, and word embeddings, and also with recent techniques such as contextualized word representations. In particular, we trained robust task-oriented subwordaware embeddings and computed tweet representations using a weighted-averaging strategy. In the final evaluation, our systems showed competitive results for both Spanish subtasks ES-A and ES-B, achieving the first and fourth places respectively.