CODEOFCONDUCT at Multilingual Counterspeech Generation: A Context-Aware Model for Robust Counterspeech Generation in Low-Resource Languages

Michael Bennie, Bushi Xiao, Chryseis Xinyi Liu, Demi Zhang, Jian Meng


Abstract
This paper introduces a context-aware model for robust counterspeech generation, which achieved significant success in the MCG-COLING-2025 shared task. Our approach particularly excelled in low-resource language settings. By leveraging a simulated annealing algorithm fine-tuned on multilingual datasets, the model generates factually accurate responses to hate speech. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across four languages (Basque, English, Italian, and Spanish), with our system ranking first for Basque, second for Italian, and third for both English and Spanish. Notably, our model swept all three top positions for Basque, highlighting its effectiveness in low-resource scenarios. Evaluation of the shared task employs both traditional metrics (BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore, Novelty) and the LLM-based JudgeLM. We present a detailed analysis of our results, including error cases and potential improvements. This work contributes to the growing body of research on multilingual counterspeech generation, offering insights into developing robust models that can adapt to diverse linguistic and cultural contexts in the fight against online hate speech.
Anthology ID:
2025.mcg-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multilingual Counterspeech Generation
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Helena Bonaldi, María Estrella Vallecillo-Rodríguez, Irune Zubiaga, Arturo Montejo-Ráez, Aitor Soroa, María Teresa Martín-Valdivia, Marco Guerini, Rodrigo Agerri
Venues:
MCG | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
37–46
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.mcg-1.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Bennie, Bushi Xiao, Chryseis Xinyi Liu, Demi Zhang, and Jian Meng. 2025. CODEOFCONDUCT at Multilingual Counterspeech Generation: A Context-Aware Model for Robust Counterspeech Generation in Low-Resource Languages. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multilingual Counterspeech Generation, pages 37–46, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CODEOFCONDUCT at Multilingual Counterspeech Generation: A Context-Aware Model for Robust Counterspeech Generation in Low-Resource Languages (Bennie et al., MCG 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.mcg-1.5.pdf
Optionalsupplementarymaterial:
 2025.mcg-1.5.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip