With the rise of online abuse, the NLP community has begun investigating the use of neural architectures to generate counterspeech that can “counter” the vicious tone of such abusive speech and dilute/ameliorate their rippling effect over the social network. However, most of the efforts so far have been primarily focused on English. To bridge the gap for low-resource languages such as Bengali and Hindi, we create a benchmark dataset of 5,062 abusive speech/counterspeech pairs, of which 2,460 pairs are in Bengali, and 2,602 pairs are in Hindi. We implement several baseline models considering various interlingual transfer mechanisms with different configurations to generate suitable counterspeech to set up an effective benchmark. We observe that the monolingual setup yields the best performance. Further, using synthetic transfer, language models can generate counterspeech to some extent; specifically, we notice that transferability is better when languages belong to the same language family.

Counterspeech presents a viable alternative to banning or suspending users for hate speech while upholding freedom of expression. However, writing effective counterspeech is challenging for moderators/users. Hence, developing suggestion tools for writing counterspeech is the need of the hour. One critical challenge in developing such a tool is the lack of quality and diversity of the responses in the existing datasets. Hence, we introduce a new dataset - CrowdCounter containing 3,425 hate speech-counterspeech pairs spanning six different counterspeech types (empathy, humor, questioning, warning, shaming, contradiction), which is the first of its kind. The design of our annotation platform itself encourages annotators to write type-specific, non-redundant and high-quality counterspeech. We evaluate two frameworks for generating counterspeech responses - vanilla and type-controlled prompts - across four large language models. In terms of metrics, we evaluate the responses using relevance, diversity and quality. We observe that Flan-T5 is the best model in the vanilla framework across different models. Type-specific prompts enhance the relevance of the responses, although they might reduce the language quality. DialoGPT proves to be the best at following the instructions and generating the type-specific counterspeech accurately.

Recently, influence functions present an apparatus for achieving explainability for deep neural models by quantifying the perturbation of individual train instances that might impact a test prediction. Our objectives in this paper are twofold. First we incorporate influence functions as a feedback into the model to improve its performance. Second, in a dataset extension exercise, using influence functions to automatically identify data points that have been initially ‘silver’ annotated by some existing method and need to be cross-checked (and corrected) by annotators to improve the model performance. To meet these objectives, in this paper, we introduce InfFeed, which uses influence functions to compute the influential instances for a target instance. Toward the first objective, we adjust the label of the target instance based on its influencer(s) label. In doing this, InfFeed outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines (including LLMs) by a maximum macro F1-score margin of almost 4% for hate speech classification, 3.5% for stance classification, and 3% for irony and 2% for sarcasm detection. Toward the second objective we show that manually re-annotating only those silver annotated data points in the extension set that have a negative influence can immensely improve the model performance bringing it very close to the scenario where all the data points in the extension set have gold labels. This allows for huge reduction of the number of data points that need to be manually annotated since out of the silver annotated extension dataset, the influence function scheme picks up ~1/1000 points that need manual correction.

With the emergence of numerous Large Language Models (LLM), the usage of such models in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications is increasing extensively. Counterspeech generation is one such key task where efforts are made to develop generative models by fine-tuning LLMs with hatespeech - counterspeech pairs, but none of these attempts explores the intrinsic properties of large language models in zero-shot settings. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of the performances of four LLMs namely GPT-2, DialoGPT, ChatGPT and FlanT5 in zero-shot settings for counterspeech generation, which is the first of its kind. For GPT-2 and DialoGPT, we further investigate the deviation in performance with respect to the sizes (small, medium, large) of the models. On the other hand, we propose three different prompting strategies for generating different types of counterspeech and analyse the impact of such strategies on the performance of the models. Our analysis shows that there is an improvement in generation quality for two datasets (17%), however the toxicity increase (25%) with increase in model size. Considering type of model, GPT-2 and FlanT5 models are significantly better in terms of counterspeech quality but also have high toxicity as compared to DialoGPT. ChatGPT are much better at generating counter speech than other models across all metrics. In terms of prompting, we find that our proposed strategies help in improving counter speech generation across all the models.

Recently efforts have been made by social media platforms as well as researchers to detect hateful or toxic language using large language models. However, none of these works aim to use explanation, additional context and victim community information in the detection process. We utilise different prompt variation, input information and evaluate large language models in zero shot setting (without adding any in-context examples). We select two large language models (GPT-3.5 and text-davinci) and three datasets - HateXplain, implicit hate and ToxicSpans. We find that on average including the target information in the pipeline improves the model performance substantially (∼20-30%) over the baseline across the datasets. There is also a considerable effect of adding the rationales/explanations into the pipeline (∼10-20%) over the baseline across the datasets. In addition, we further provide a typology of the error cases where these large language models fail to (i) classify and (ii) explain the reason for the decisions they take. Such vulnerable points automatically constitute ‘jailbreak’ prompts for these models and industry scale safeguard techniques need to be developed to make the models robust against such prompts.

The proliferation of online hate speech has necessitated the creation of algorithms which can detect toxicity. Most of the past research focuses on this detection as a classification task, but assigning an absolute toxicity label is often tricky. Hence, few of the past works transform the same task into a regression. This paper shows the comparative evaluation of different transformers and traditional machine learning models on a recently released toxicity severity measurement dataset by Jigsaw. We further demonstrate the issues with the model predictions using explainability analysis.

Due to the sheer volume of online hate, the AI and NLP communities have started building models to detect such hateful content. Recently, multilingual hate is a major emerging challenge for automated detection where code-mixing or more than one language have been used for conversation in social media. Typically, hate speech detection models are evaluated by measuring their performance on the held-out test data using metrics such as accuracy and F1-score. While these metrics are useful, it becomes difficult to identify using them where the model is failing, and how to resolve it. To enable more targeted diagnostic insights of such multilingual hate speech models, we introduce a set of functionalities for the purpose of evaluation. We have been inspired to design this kind of functionalities based on real-world conversation on social media. Considering Hindi as a base language, we craft test cases for each functionality. We name our evaluation dataset HateCheckHIn. To illustrate the utility of these functionalities , we test state-of-the-art transformer based m-BERT model and the Perspective API.

Social media often serves as a breeding ground for various hateful and offensive content. Identifying such content on social media is crucial due to its impact on the race, gender, or religion in an unprejudiced society. However, while there is extensive research in hate speech detection in English, there is a gap in hateful content detection in low-resource languages like Bengali. Besides, a current trend on social media is the use of Romanized Bengali for regular interactions. To overcome the existing research’s limitations, in this study, we develop an annotated dataset of 10K Bengali posts consisting of 5K actual and 5K Romanized Bengali tweets. We implement several baseline models for the classification of such hateful posts. We further explore the interlingual transfer mechanism to boost classification performance. Finally, we perform an in-depth error analysis by looking into the misclassified posts by the models. While training actual and Romanized datasets separately, we observe that XLM-Roberta performs the best. Further, we witness that on joint training and few-shot training, MuRIL outperforms other models by interpreting the semantic expressions better. We make our code and dataset public for others.

Social media often acts as breeding grounds for different forms of offensive content. For low resource languages like Tamil, the situation is more complex due to the poor performance of multilingual or language-specific models and lack of proper benchmark datasets. Based on this shared task “Offensive Language Identification in Dravidian Languages” at EACL 2021; we present an exhaustive exploration of different transformer models, We also provide a genetic algorithm technique for ensembling different models. Our ensembled models trained separately for each language secured the first position in Tamil, the second position in Kannada, and the first position in Malayalam sub-tasks. The models and codes are provided.