From Detection to Explanation: Effective Learning Strategies for LLMs in Online Abusive Language Research

Chiara Di Bonaventura, Lucia Siciliani, Pierpaolo Basile, Albert Merono Penuela, Barbara McGillivray


Abstract
Abusive language detection relies on understanding different levels of intensity, expressiveness and targeted groups, which requires commonsense reasoning, world knowledge and linguistic nuances that evolve over time. Here, we frame the problem as a knowledge-guided learning task, and demonstrate that LLMs’ implicit knowledge without an accurate strategy is not suitable for multi-class detection nor explanation generation. We publicly release GLlama Alarm, the knowledge-Guided version of Llama-2 instruction fine-tuned for multi-class abusive language detection and explanation generation. By being fine-tuned on structured explanations and external reliable knowledge sources, our model mitigates bias and generates explanations that are relevant to the text and coherent with human reasoning, with an average 48.76% better alignment with human judgment according to our expert survey.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.141
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2067–2084
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.141/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chiara Di Bonaventura, Lucia Siciliani, Pierpaolo Basile, Albert Merono Penuela, and Barbara McGillivray. 2025. From Detection to Explanation: Effective Learning Strategies for LLMs in Online Abusive Language Research. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2067–2084, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Detection to Explanation: Effective Learning Strategies for LLMs in Online Abusive Language Research (Di Bonaventura et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.141.pdf