Leveraging LLMs for Context-Aware Implicit Textual and Multimodal Hate Speech Detection

Joshua Brook, Ilia Markov


Abstract
This paper investigates the use of an LLM to generate auxiliary background context for social media posts, and explores four methods to incorporate this context into the input of an SBERT-based Hate Speech Detection (HSD) classifier. These are: text concatenation, embedding concatenation, a hierarchical transformer-based fusion, and LLM-driven text enhancement. We evaluate the impact of our context generation and incorporation strategies in a textual setting on the Latent Hatred dataset of implicitly hateful tweets and a multimodal setting on the MAMI dataset of misogynous internet memes. Results are evaluated against a zero-context baseline, two previous approaches based on entity linking, and a zero-shot LLM classifier. Findings indicate that incorporating generated context improves HSD performance by up to 3 and 6 F1 points on textual and multimodal settings respectively, from a zero-context baseline to the highest-performing system, based on embedding concatenation.
Anthology ID:
2026.woah-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Agostina Calabrese, Thomas Davidson, Christine de Kock, Urja Khurana, Marta Marchiori Manerba, Paloma Piot, Zeerak Talat
Venues:
WOAH | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
119–138
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.woah-1.11/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joshua Brook and Ilia Markov. 2026. Leveraging LLMs for Context-Aware Implicit Textual and Multimodal Hate Speech Detection. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), pages 119–138, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging LLMs for Context-Aware Implicit Textual and Multimodal Hate Speech Detection (Brook & Markov, WOAH 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.woah-1.11.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2026.woah-1.11.SupplementaryMaterial.zip