Hate Speech and Offensive Language Detection in Bengali

Mithun Das, Somnath Banerjee, Punyajoy Saha, Animesh Mukherjee


Abstract
Social media often serves as a breeding ground for various hateful and offensive content. Identifying such content on social media is crucial due to its impact on the race, gender, or religion in an unprejudiced society. However, while there is extensive research in hate speech detection in English, there is a gap in hateful content detection in low-resource languages like Bengali. Besides, a current trend on social media is the use of Romanized Bengali for regular interactions. To overcome the existing research’s limitations, in this study, we develop an annotated dataset of 10K Bengali posts consisting of 5K actual and 5K Romanized Bengali tweets. We implement several baseline models for the classification of such hateful posts. We further explore the interlingual transfer mechanism to boost classification performance. Finally, we perform an in-depth error analysis by looking into the misclassified posts by the models. While training actual and Romanized datasets separately, we observe that XLM-Roberta performs the best. Further, we witness that on joint training and few-shot training, MuRIL outperforms other models by interpreting the semantic expressions better. We make our code and dataset public for others.
Anthology ID:
2022.aacl-main.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online only
Editors:
Yulan He, Heng Ji, Sujian Li, Yang Liu, Chua-Hui Chang
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
286–296
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.23
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mithun Das, Somnath Banerjee, Punyajoy Saha, and Animesh Mukherjee. 2022. Hate Speech and Offensive Language Detection in Bengali. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 286–296, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hate Speech and Offensive Language Detection in Bengali (Das et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.23.pdf