Cross-Cultural Transfer Learning for Chinese Offensive Language Detection

Li Zhou, Laura Cabello, Yong Cao, Daniel Hershcovich


Abstract
Detecting offensive language is a challenging task. Generalizing across different cultures and languages becomes even more challenging: besides lexical, syntactic and semantic differences, pragmatic aspects such as cultural norms and sensitivities, which are particularly relevant in this context, vary greatly. In this paper, we target Chinese offensive language detection and aim to investigate the impact of transfer learning using offensive language detection data from different cultural backgrounds, specifically Korean and English. We find that culture-specific biases in what is considered offensive negatively impact the transferability of language models (LMs) and that LMs trained on diverse cultural data are sensitive to different features in Chinese offensive language detection. In a few-shot learning scenario, however, our study shows promising prospects for non-English offensive language detection with limited resources. Our findings highlight the importance of cross-cultural transfer learning in improving offensive language detection and promoting inclusive digital spaces.
Anthology ID:
2023.c3nlp-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP)
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Sunipa Dev, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, David Adelani, Dirk Hovy, Luciana Benotti
Venue:
C3NLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8–15
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.c3nlp-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.c3nlp-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Li Zhou, Laura Cabello, Yong Cao, and Daniel Hershcovich. 2023. Cross-Cultural Transfer Learning for Chinese Offensive Language Detection. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP), pages 8–15, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Cultural Transfer Learning for Chinese Offensive Language Detection (Zhou et al., C3NLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.c3nlp-1.2.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.c3nlp-1.2.mp4