HunterSpeechLab at GermEval 2021: Does Your Comment Claim A Fact? Contextualized Embeddings for German Fact-Claiming Comment Classification

In this paper we investigate the efficacy of using contextual embeddings from multilingual BERT and German BERT in identifying fact-claiming comments in German on social media. Additionally, we examine the impact of formulating the classification problem as a multi-task learning problem, where the model identifies toxicity and engagement of the comment in addition to identifying whether it is fact-claiming. We provide a thorough comparison of the two BERT based models compared with a logistic regression baseline and show that German BERT features trained using a multi-task objective achieves the best F1 score on the test set. This work was done as part of a submission to GermEval 2021 shared task on the identification of fact-claiming comments.