Niclas Hildebrandt

in a nutshell

Niclas Hildebrandt is a Data Scientist at PSI FLS. He studied Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at TU Dortmund where he worked as a student trainee in the field of numerical modelling of quantum physics in semiconductor components. His research interests are statistical data analysis and explainable AI.

publications

2021

Data Science Kitchen at GermEval 2021: A Fine Selection of Hand-Picked Features, Delivered Fresh from the Oven

Niclas Hildebrandt, Benedikt Bönninghoff, Dennis Orth, and Christopher Schymura

Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache/Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS)

Abs PDF

This paper presents the contribution of the Data Science Kitchen at GermEval 2021 shared task on the identification of toxic, engaging, and fact-claiming comments. The task aims at extending the identification of offensive language, by including additional subtasks that identify comments which should be prioritized for fact-checking by moderators and community managers. Our contribution focuses on a feature-engineering approach with a conventional classification backend. We combine semantic and writing style embeddings derived from pre-trained deep neural networks with additional numerical features, specifically designed for this task. Ensembles of Logistic Regression classifiers and Support Vector Machines are used to derive predictions for each subtask via a majority voting scheme. Our best submission achieved macro-averaged F1-scores of 66.8%, 69.9% and 72.5% for the identification of toxic, engaging, and fact-claiming comments.