A Federated Approach to Few-Shot Hate Speech Detection for Marginalized Communities

Haotian Ye, Axel Wisiorek, Antonis Maronikolakis, Özge Alaçam, Hinrich Schütze


Abstract
Despite substantial efforts, detecting and preventing hate speech online remains an understudied task for marginalized communities, particularly in the Global South, which includes developing societies with increasing internet penetration. In this paper, we aim to provide marginalized communities in societies where the dominant language is low-resource with a privacy-preserving tool to protect themselves from online hate speech by filtering offensive content in their native languages. Our contributions are twofold: 1) we release REACT (REsponsive hate speech datasets Across ConTexts), a collection of high-quality, culturespecific hate speech detection datasets comprising multiple target groups and low-resource languages, curated by experienced data collectors; 2) we propose a few-shot hate speech detection approach based on federated learning (FL), a privacy-preserving method for collaboratively training a central model that exhibits robustness when tackling different target groups and languages. By keeping training local to user devices, we ensure data privacy while leveraging the collective learning benefits of FL. We experiment with both multilingual and monolingual pre-trained representation spaces as backbones to examine the interaction between FL and different model representations. Furthermore, we explore personalized client models tailored to specific target groups and evaluate their performance. Our findings indicate the overall effectiveness of FL across different target groups, and point to personalization as a promising direction.
Anthology ID:
2025.mrl-main.41
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2025)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhuo, China
Editors:
David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Catherine Arnett, Duygu Ataman, Tyler A. Chang, Hila Gonen, Rahul Raja, Fabian Schmidt, David Stap, Jiayi Wang
Venues:
MRL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
631–651
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.mrl-main.41/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haotian Ye, Axel Wisiorek, Antonis Maronikolakis, Özge Alaçam, and Hinrich Schütze. 2025. A Federated Approach to Few-Shot Hate Speech Detection for Marginalized Communities. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2025), pages 631–651, Suzhuo, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Federated Approach to Few-Shot Hate Speech Detection for Marginalized Communities (Ye et al., MRL 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.mrl-main.41.pdf