Offensive language detection and target identification are essential for maintaining respectful online environments. While these tasks have been widely studied for English, comparatively less attention has been given to other language, including Persian and Pashto, and the effectiveness of recent large language models for these languages remains underexplored. To address this gap, we created a comprehensive benchmark of diverse modeling approaches in Persian and Pashto. Our evaluation covers zeroshot, fine-tuned, and cross-lingual transfer settings, analyzing when detection succeeds or fails across different model approaches. This study provides one of the first systematic analyses of offensive language detection and crosslingual transfer between these languages.

Toxic language detection is crucial for creating safer online environments and limiting the spread of harmful content. While toxic language detection has been under-explored in Persian, the current work compares different methods for this task, including fine-tuning, data enrichment, zero-shot and few-shot learning, and cross-lingual transfer learning. What is especially compelling is the impact of cultural context on transfer learning for this task: We show that the language of a country with cultural similarities to Persian yields better results in transfer learning. Conversely, the improvement is lower when the language comes from a culturally distinct country.