An Adaptive Supervised Contrastive Learning Framework for Implicit Sexism Detection in Digital Social Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rehman, Mohammad Zia Ur, Shah, Aditya, Kumar, Nagendra
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Rehman, Mohammad Zia Ur
Shah, Aditya
Kumar, Nagendra
author_facet Rehman, Mohammad Zia Ur
Shah, Aditya
Kumar, Nagendra
contents The global reach of social media has amplified the spread of hateful content, including implicit sexism, which is often overlooked by conventional detection methods. In this work, we introduce an Adaptive Supervised Contrastive lEarning framework for implicit sexism detectioN (ASCEND). A key innovation of our method is the incorporation of threshold-based contrastive learning: by computing cosine similarities between embeddings, we selectively treat only those sample pairs as positive if their similarity exceeds a learnable threshold. This mechanism refines the embedding space by robustly pulling together representations of semantically similar texts while pushing apart dissimilar ones, thus reducing false positives and negatives. The final classification is achieved by jointly optimizing a contrastive loss with a cross-entropy loss. Textual features are enhanced through a word-level attention module. Additionally, we employ sentiment, emotion, and toxicity features. Evaluations on the EXIST2021 and MLSC datasets demonstrate that ASCEND significantly outperforms existing methods, with average Macro F1 improvements of 9.86%, 29.63%, and 32.51% across multiple tasks, highlighting its efficacy in capturing the subtle cues of implicit sexist language.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_05271
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Adaptive Supervised Contrastive Learning Framework for Implicit Sexism Detection in Digital Social Networks
Rehman, Mohammad Zia Ur
Shah, Aditya
Kumar, Nagendra
Computation and Language
The global reach of social media has amplified the spread of hateful content, including implicit sexism, which is often overlooked by conventional detection methods. In this work, we introduce an Adaptive Supervised Contrastive lEarning framework for implicit sexism detectioN (ASCEND). A key innovation of our method is the incorporation of threshold-based contrastive learning: by computing cosine similarities between embeddings, we selectively treat only those sample pairs as positive if their similarity exceeds a learnable threshold. This mechanism refines the embedding space by robustly pulling together representations of semantically similar texts while pushing apart dissimilar ones, thus reducing false positives and negatives. The final classification is achieved by jointly optimizing a contrastive loss with a cross-entropy loss. Textual features are enhanced through a word-level attention module. Additionally, we employ sentiment, emotion, and toxicity features. Evaluations on the EXIST2021 and MLSC datasets demonstrate that ASCEND significantly outperforms existing methods, with average Macro F1 improvements of 9.86%, 29.63%, and 32.51% across multiple tasks, highlighting its efficacy in capturing the subtle cues of implicit sexist language.
title An Adaptive Supervised Contrastive Learning Framework for Implicit Sexism Detection in Digital Social Networks
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05271