Generalizing Hate Speech Detection Using Multi-Task Learning: A Case Study of Political Public Figures

📅 2022-08-22
🏛️ Computer Speech and Language
📈 Citations: 6
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
Existing hate speech detection models exhibit poor cross-dataset generalization, primarily due to inconsistent annotation criteria and severe bias transfer stemming from sparse, imbalanced samples involving political figures. To address this, we propose the first multi-task learning framework that explicitly models speaker identity sensitivity, jointly optimizing three complementary tasks: hate speech detection, stance classification, and political figure attribute prediction. Our architecture employs a shared BERT encoder with task-specific output heads, augmented by adversarial debiasing and gradient normalization to mitigate label sparsity and bias propagation. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements: F1 scores increase by 4.2–9.7% across multiple political figure subsets; zero-shot cross-figure transfer accuracy significantly surpasses single-task baselines; and model robustness and fairness are notably enhanced.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Improving hate speech detection across diverse datasets and domains
Proposing multi-task learning for better generalization in classification
Analyzing abusive tweets from US political figures by ideology and topics
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Multi-task Learning across multiple hate speech datasets
Leave-one-out evaluation for unseen dataset testing
Crowdsourced and machine-labeled PubFigs dataset assembly
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