How to Solve Few-Shot Abusive Content Detection Using the Data We Actually Have

Viktor Hangya, Alexander Fraser


Abstract
Due to the broad range of social media platforms, the requirements of abusive language detection systems are varied and ever-changing. Already a large set of annotated corpora with different properties and label sets were created, such as hate or misogyny detection, but the form and targets of abusive speech are constantly evolving. Since, the annotation of new corpora is expensive, in this work we leverage datasets we already have, covering a wide range of tasks related to abusive language detection. Our goal is to build models cheaply for a new target label set and/or language, using only a few training examples of the target domain. We propose a two-step approach: first we train our model in a multitask fashion. We then carry out few-shot adaptation to the target requirements. Our experiments show that using already existing datasets and only a few-shots of the target task the performance of models improve both monolingually and across languages. Our analysis also shows that our models acquire a general understanding of abusive language, since they improve the prediction of labels which are present only in the target dataset and can benefit from knowledge about labels which are not directly used for the target task.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.729
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
8307–8322
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.729
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Viktor Hangya and Alexander Fraser. 2024. How to Solve Few-Shot Abusive Content Detection Using the Data We Actually Have. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 8307–8322, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
How to Solve Few-Shot Abusive Content Detection Using the Data We Actually Have (Hangya & Fraser, LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.729.pdf