Data-Efficient Strategies for Expanding Hate Speech Detection into Under-Resourced Languages

Paul Röttger, Debora Nozza, Federico Bianchi, Dirk Hovy


Abstract
Hate speech is a global phenomenon, but most hate speech datasets so far focus on English-language content. This hinders the development of more effective hate speech detection models in hundreds of languages spoken by billions across the world. More data is needed, but annotating hateful content is expensive, time-consuming and potentially harmful to annotators. To mitigate these issues, we explore data-efficient strategies for expanding hate speech detection into under-resourced languages. In a series of experiments with mono- and multilingual models across five non-English languages, we find that 1) a small amount of target-language fine-tuning data is needed to achieve strong performance, 2) the benefits of using more such data decrease exponentially, and 3) initial fine-tuning on readily-available English data can partially substitute target-language data and improve model generalisability. Based on these findings, we formulate actionable recommendations for hate speech detection in low-resource language settings.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.383
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5674–5691
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.383
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.383
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paul Röttger, Debora Nozza, Federico Bianchi, and Dirk Hovy. 2022. Data-Efficient Strategies for Expanding Hate Speech Detection into Under-Resourced Languages. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5674–5691, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Data-Efficient Strategies for Expanding Hate Speech Detection into Under-Resourced Languages (Röttger et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.383.pdf