Beyond Content: A Comprehensive Speech Toxicity Dataset and Detection Framework Incorporating Paralinguistic Cues

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ba, Zhongjie, Yi, Liang, Cheng, Peng, Li, Qingcao, Wang, Qinglong, Lu, Li
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ba, Zhongjie
Yi, Liang
Cheng, Peng
Li, Qingcao
Wang, Qinglong
Lu, Li
author_facet Ba, Zhongjie
Yi, Liang
Cheng, Peng
Li, Qingcao
Wang, Qinglong
Lu, Li
contents Toxic speech detection has become a crucial challenge in maintaining safe online communication environments. However, existing approaches to toxic speech detection often neglect the contribution of paralinguistic cues, such as emotion, intonation, and speech rate, which are key to detecting speech toxicity. Moreover, current toxic speech datasets are predominantly text-based, limiting the development of models that can capture paralinguistic cues.To address these challenges, we present ToxiAlert-Bench, a large-scale audio dataset comprising over 30,000 audio clips annotated with seven major toxic categories and twenty fine-grained toxic labels. Uniquely, our dataset annotates toxicity sources -- distinguishing between textual content and paralinguistic origins -- for comprehensive toxic speech analysis.Furthermore, we propose a dual-head neural network with a multi-stage training strategy tailored for toxic speech detection. This architecture features two task-specific classification headers: one for identifying the source of sensitivity (textual or paralinguistic), and the other for categorizing the specific toxic type. The training process involves independent head training followed by joint fine-tuning to reduce task interference. To mitigate data class imbalance, we incorporate class-balanced sampling and weighted loss functions.Our experimental results show that leveraging paralinguistic features significantly improves detection performance. Our method consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple evaluation metrics, with a 21.1% relative improvement in Macro-F1 score and a 13.0% relative gain in accuracy over the strongest baseline, highlighting its enhanced effectiveness and practical applicability.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_15984
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Content: A Comprehensive Speech Toxicity Dataset and Detection Framework Incorporating Paralinguistic Cues
Ba, Zhongjie
Yi, Liang
Cheng, Peng
Li, Qingcao
Wang, Qinglong
Lu, Li
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Toxic speech detection has become a crucial challenge in maintaining safe online communication environments. However, existing approaches to toxic speech detection often neglect the contribution of paralinguistic cues, such as emotion, intonation, and speech rate, which are key to detecting speech toxicity. Moreover, current toxic speech datasets are predominantly text-based, limiting the development of models that can capture paralinguistic cues.To address these challenges, we present ToxiAlert-Bench, a large-scale audio dataset comprising over 30,000 audio clips annotated with seven major toxic categories and twenty fine-grained toxic labels. Uniquely, our dataset annotates toxicity sources -- distinguishing between textual content and paralinguistic origins -- for comprehensive toxic speech analysis.Furthermore, we propose a dual-head neural network with a multi-stage training strategy tailored for toxic speech detection. This architecture features two task-specific classification headers: one for identifying the source of sensitivity (textual or paralinguistic), and the other for categorizing the specific toxic type. The training process involves independent head training followed by joint fine-tuning to reduce task interference. To mitigate data class imbalance, we incorporate class-balanced sampling and weighted loss functions.Our experimental results show that leveraging paralinguistic features significantly improves detection performance. Our method consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple evaluation metrics, with a 21.1% relative improvement in Macro-F1 score and a 13.0% relative gain in accuracy over the strongest baseline, highlighting its enhanced effectiveness and practical applicability.
title Beyond Content: A Comprehensive Speech Toxicity Dataset and Detection Framework Incorporating Paralinguistic Cues
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15984