Compositional Generalisation for Explainable Hate Speech Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Calabrese, Agostina, Sherborne, Tom, Ross, Björn, Lapata, Mirella
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Calabrese, Agostina
Sherborne, Tom
Ross, Björn
Lapata, Mirella
author_facet Calabrese, Agostina
Sherborne, Tom
Ross, Björn
Lapata, Mirella
contents Hate speech detection is key to online content moderation, but current models struggle to generalise beyond their training data. This has been linked to dataset biases and the use of sentence-level labels, which fail to teach models the underlying structure of hate speech. In this work, we show that even when models are trained with more fine-grained, span-level annotations (e.g., "artists" is labeled as target and "are parasites" as dehumanising comparison), they struggle to disentangle the meaning of these labels from the surrounding context. As a result, combinations of expressions that deviate from those seen during training remain particularly difficult for models to detect. We investigate whether training on a dataset where expressions occur with equal frequency across all contexts can improve generalisation. To this end, we create U-PLEAD, a dataset of ~364,000 synthetic posts, along with a novel compositional generalisation benchmark of ~8,000 manually validated posts. Training on a combination of U-PLEAD and real data improves compositional generalisation while achieving state-of-the-art performance on the human-sourced PLEAD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03916
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Compositional Generalisation for Explainable Hate Speech Detection
Calabrese, Agostina
Sherborne, Tom
Ross, Björn
Lapata, Mirella
Computation and Language
Hate speech detection is key to online content moderation, but current models struggle to generalise beyond their training data. This has been linked to dataset biases and the use of sentence-level labels, which fail to teach models the underlying structure of hate speech. In this work, we show that even when models are trained with more fine-grained, span-level annotations (e.g., "artists" is labeled as target and "are parasites" as dehumanising comparison), they struggle to disentangle the meaning of these labels from the surrounding context. As a result, combinations of expressions that deviate from those seen during training remain particularly difficult for models to detect. We investigate whether training on a dataset where expressions occur with equal frequency across all contexts can improve generalisation. To this end, we create U-PLEAD, a dataset of ~364,000 synthetic posts, along with a novel compositional generalisation benchmark of ~8,000 manually validated posts. Training on a combination of U-PLEAD and real data improves compositional generalisation while achieving state-of-the-art performance on the human-sourced PLEAD.
title Compositional Generalisation for Explainable Hate Speech Detection
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03916