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Main Authors: Zhan, Xianyang, Goyal, Agam, Chen, Yilun, Chandrasekharan, Eshwar, Saha, Koustuv
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13155
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author Zhan, Xianyang
Goyal, Agam
Chen, Yilun
Chandrasekharan, Eshwar
Saha, Koustuv
author_facet Zhan, Xianyang
Goyal, Agam
Chen, Yilun
Chandrasekharan, Eshwar
Saha, Koustuv
contents Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in many natural language understanding tasks, including content moderation. However, these models can be expensive to query in real-time and do not allow for a community-specific approach to content moderation. To address these challenges, we explore the use of open-source small language models (SLMs) for community-specific content moderation tasks. We fine-tune and evaluate SLMs (less than 15B parameters) by comparing their performance against much larger open- and closed-sourced models in both a zero-shot and few-shot setting. Using 150K comments from 15 popular Reddit communities, we find that SLMs outperform zero-shot LLMs at content moderation -- 11.5% higher accuracy and 25.7% higher recall on average across all communities. Moreover, few-shot in-context learning leads to only a marginal increase in the performance of LLMs, still lacking compared to SLMs. We further show the promise of cross-community content moderation, which has implications for new communities and the development of cross-platform moderation techniques. Finally, we outline directions for future work on language model based content moderation. Code and models can be found at https://github.com/AGoyal0512/SLM-Mod.
format Preprint
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publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SLM-Mod: Small Language Models Surpass LLMs at Content Moderation
Zhan, Xianyang
Goyal, Agam
Chen, Yilun
Chandrasekharan, Eshwar
Saha, Koustuv
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in many natural language understanding tasks, including content moderation. However, these models can be expensive to query in real-time and do not allow for a community-specific approach to content moderation. To address these challenges, we explore the use of open-source small language models (SLMs) for community-specific content moderation tasks. We fine-tune and evaluate SLMs (less than 15B parameters) by comparing their performance against much larger open- and closed-sourced models in both a zero-shot and few-shot setting. Using 150K comments from 15 popular Reddit communities, we find that SLMs outperform zero-shot LLMs at content moderation -- 11.5% higher accuracy and 25.7% higher recall on average across all communities. Moreover, few-shot in-context learning leads to only a marginal increase in the performance of LLMs, still lacking compared to SLMs. We further show the promise of cross-community content moderation, which has implications for new communities and the development of cross-platform moderation techniques. Finally, we outline directions for future work on language model based content moderation. Code and models can be found at https://github.com/AGoyal0512/SLM-Mod.
title SLM-Mod: Small Language Models Surpass LLMs at Content Moderation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13155