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Combating Hate: How Multilingual Transformers Can Help Detect Topical Hate Speech

13 pagesPublished: May 26, 2023

Abstract

Automated hate speech detection is important to protecting people’s dignity, online experiences, and physical safety in Society 5.0. Transformers are sophisticated pre- trained language models that can be fine-tuned for multilingual hate speech detection. Many studies consider this application as a binary classification problem. Additionally, research on topical hate speech detection use target-specific datasets containing assertions about a particular group. In this paper we investigate multi-class hate speech detection using target-generic datasets. We assess the performance of mBERT and XLM-RoBERTA on high and low resource languages, with limited sample sizes and class imbalance. We find that our fine-tuned mBERT models are performant in detecting gender-targeted hate speech. Our Urdu classifier produces a 31% lift on the baseline model. We also present a pipeline for processing multilingual datasets for multi-class hate speech detection. Our approach could be used in future works on topically focused hate speech detection for other low resource languages, particularly African languages which remain under-explored in this domain.

Keyphrases: hate speech, machine learning, natural language processing

In: Aurona Gerber and Knut Hinkelmann (editors). Proceedings of Society 5.0 Conference 2023, vol 93, pages 203-215.

BibTeX entry
@inproceedings{Society5.02023:Combating_Hate_How_Multilingual,
  author    = {Trishanta Srikissoon and Vukosi Marivate},
  title     = {Combating Hate: How Multilingual Transformers Can Help Detect Topical Hate Speech},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of Society 5.0 Conference 2023},
  editor    = {Aurona Gerber and Knut Hinkelmann},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {93},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {/publications/paper/28NM},
  doi       = {10.29007/1cm6},
  pages     = {203-215},
  year      = {2023}}
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