A Federated Learning Approach to Privacy Preserving Offensive Language Identification

Marcos Zampieri, Damith Premasiri, Tharindu Ranasinghe


Abstract
The spread of various forms of offensive speech online is an important concern in social media. While platforms have been investing heavily in ways of coping with this problem, the question of privacy remains largely unaddressed. Models trained to detect offensive language on social media are trained and/or fine-tuned using large amounts of data often stored in centralized servers. Since most social media data originates from end users, we propose a privacy preserving decentralized architecture for identifying offensive language online by introducing Federated Learning (FL) in the context of offensive language identification. FL is a decentralized architecture that allows multiple models to be trained locally without the need for data sharing hence preserving users’ privacy. We propose a model fusion approach to perform FL. We trained multiple deep learning models on four publicly available English benchmark datasets (AHSD, HASOC, HateXplain, OLID) and evaluated their performance in detail. We also present initial cross-lingual experiments in English and Spanish. We show that the proposed model fusion approach outperforms baselines in all the datasets while preserving privacy.
Anthology ID:
2024.trac-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Threat, Aggression & Cyberbullying @ LREC-COLING-2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Ritesh Kumar, Atul Kr. Ojha, Shervin Malmasi, Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Bornini Lahiri, Siddharth Singh, Shyam Ratan
Venues:
TRAC | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
12–20
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.trac-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marcos Zampieri, Damith Premasiri, and Tharindu Ranasinghe. 2024. A Federated Learning Approach to Privacy Preserving Offensive Language Identification. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Threat, Aggression & Cyberbullying @ LREC-COLING-2024, pages 12–20, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
A Federated Learning Approach to Privacy Preserving Offensive Language Identification (Zampieri et al., TRAC-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.trac-1.2.pdf