Detecting transphobia, homophobia, and various other forms of hate speech is difficult. Signals can vary depending on factors such as language, culture, geographical region, and the particular online platform. Here, we present a joint multilingual (M-L) and language-specific (L-S) approach to homophobia and transphobic hate speech detection (HSD). M-L models are needed to catch words, phrases, and concepts that are less common or missing in a particular language and subsequently overlooked by L-S models. Nonetheless, L-S models are better situated to understand the cultural and linguistic context of the users who typically write in a particular language. Here we construct a simple and successful way to merge the M-L and L-S approaches through simple weight interpolation in such a way that is interpretable and data-driven. We demonstrate our system on task A of the 'Shared Task on Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in social media comments' dataset for homophobia and transphobic HSD. Our system achieves the best results in three of five languages and achieves a 0.997 macro average F1-score on Malayalam texts.

Depression is debilitating, and not uncommon. Indeed, studies of excessive social media users show correlations with depression, ADHD, and other mental health concerns. Given that there is a large number of people with excessive social media usage, then there is a significant population of potentially undiagnosed users and posts that they create. In this paper, we propose a depression severity detection system using a semi-supervised learning technique to predict if a post is from a user who is experiencing severe, moderate, or low (non-diagnostic) levels of depression. Namely, we use a trained model to classify a large number of unlabelled social media posts from Reddit, then use these generated labels to train a more powerful classifier. We demonstrate our framework on Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text - LT-EDI@RANLP 2023 shared task, where our framework ranks 3rd overall.

HBO's smash-hit adaptation The Last of Us is the latest in a string of horror stories featuring fungi as the source of fear. The zombie-like outbreak that takes place in the show, which is based on the dystopian video game series of the same name, stems from a mutated version of a parasitic mushroom which fictionally evolves to attack humans instead of insects. In Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the narrator knows something isn't right with a family and their mansion, and soon discovers an intergenerational secret intertwined with a mycelium network. In last year's What Moves the Dead, by T. Kingfisher, it's a mycologist who discovers the root of the town's sudden mysterious illnesses. Science-fiction's fungal fascination goes back much farther.

Scientists in Denmark have uncovered two new species of deadly fungi that devour from the inside, bursting from the abdomen of their still-living prey. The parasites--Strongwellsea acerosa and Strongwellsea tigrinae--infect adult flies, which continue to buzz around for days with massive holes in their bodies. As they do, the fungi rain spores from these holes down onto other unsuspecting flies. Thousands of torpedo-shaped spores can shoot out like a rocket from a single fly. The corpse of a fly with two large holes in its abdomen, caused by the fungus Strongwellsea tigrinae. Researchers from the Natural History Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen's Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences have reported on the two new fungi.

A nightmarish new image shows a'zombie' head after it was infected with a deadly parasitic fungus. The photo, taken in a forest in Singapore, shows fungal stalks bursting from the long-dead fly, which is missing both of its eyes. The photographer believes an infamous parasite named Cordyceps, which takes over its victims' bodies like a horror movie zombie virus, infected the fly before it died. A nightmarish new image shows a fly's'zombie' head after it was infected with a deadly parasitic fungus. Separate species of Cordyceps prefer different hosts, but generally the fungus takes over the bodies of insects and forces them to walk to the top of plants.