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Main Authors: Dang, Dang H., Mitrovi, Jelena, Granitzer, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09625
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author Dang, Dang H.
Mitrovi, Jelena
Granitzer, Michael
author_facet Dang, Dang H.
Mitrovi, Jelena
Granitzer, Michael
contents We study whether large-scale unlabelled web data and LLM-based synthetic annotations can improve multilingual hate speech detection. Starting from texts crawled via OpenWebSearch.eu~(OWS) in four languages (English, German, Spanish, Vietnamese), we pursue two complementary strategies. First, we apply continued pre-training to BERT models by continuing masked language modelling on unlabelled OWS texts before supervised fine-tuning, and show that this yields an average macro-F1 gain of approximately 3% over standard baselines across sixteen benchmarks, with stronger gains in low-resource settings. Second, we use four open-source LLMs (Mistral-7B, Llama3.1-8B, Gemma2-9B, Qwen2.5-14B) to produce synthetic annotations through three ensemble strategies: mean averaging, majority voting, and a LightGBM meta-learner. The LightGBM ensemble consistently outperforms the other strategies. Fine-tuning on these synthetic labels substantially benefits a small model (Llama3.2-1B: +11% pooled F1), but provides only a modest gain for the larger Qwen2.5-14B (+0.6%). Our results indicate that the combination of web-scale unlabelled data and LLM-ensemble annotations is the most valuable for smaller models and low-resource languages.
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spellingShingle Toward Generalized Cross-Lingual Hateful Language Detection with Web-Scale Data and Ensemble LLM Annotations
Dang, Dang H.
Mitrovi, Jelena
Granitzer, Michael
Computation and Language
We study whether large-scale unlabelled web data and LLM-based synthetic annotations can improve multilingual hate speech detection. Starting from texts crawled via OpenWebSearch.eu~(OWS) in four languages (English, German, Spanish, Vietnamese), we pursue two complementary strategies. First, we apply continued pre-training to BERT models by continuing masked language modelling on unlabelled OWS texts before supervised fine-tuning, and show that this yields an average macro-F1 gain of approximately 3% over standard baselines across sixteen benchmarks, with stronger gains in low-resource settings. Second, we use four open-source LLMs (Mistral-7B, Llama3.1-8B, Gemma2-9B, Qwen2.5-14B) to produce synthetic annotations through three ensemble strategies: mean averaging, majority voting, and a LightGBM meta-learner. The LightGBM ensemble consistently outperforms the other strategies. Fine-tuning on these synthetic labels substantially benefits a small model (Llama3.2-1B: +11% pooled F1), but provides only a modest gain for the larger Qwen2.5-14B (+0.6%). Our results indicate that the combination of web-scale unlabelled data and LLM-ensemble annotations is the most valuable for smaller models and low-resource languages.
title Toward Generalized Cross-Lingual Hateful Language Detection with Web-Scale Data and Ensemble LLM Annotations
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09625