This paper addresses the identification of toxic, engaging, and fact-claiming comments on social media. We used the dataset made available by the organizers of the GermEval2021 shared task containing over 3,000 manually annotated Facebook comments in
German. Considering the relatedness of the three tasks, we approached the problem using large pre-trained transformer models and multitask learning. Our results indicate that multitask learning achieves performance superior to the more common single task learning approach in all three tasks. We submit our best systems to GermEval-2021 under the team name WLV-RIT.
In this paper we present UPAppliedCL's contribution to the GermEval 2021 Shared Task. In particular, we participated in Subtasks 2 (Engaging Comment Classification) and 3 (Fact-Claiming Comment Classification). While acceptable results can be obtaine
d by using unigrams or linguistic features in combination with traditional machine learning models, we show that for both tasks transformer models trained on fine-tuned BERT embeddings yield best results.
