Exploring Large Language Models for Hate Speech Detection in Rioplatense Spanish

Juan Manuel Pérez, Paula Miguel, Viviana Cotik


Abstract
Hate speech detection deals with many language variants, slang, slurs, expression modalities, and cultural nuances. This outlines the importance of working with specific corpora, when addressing hate speech within the scope of Natural Language Processing, recently revolutionized by the irruption of Large Language Models. This work presents a brief analysis of the performance of large language models in the detection of Hate Speech for Rioplatense Spanish. We performed classification experiments leveraging chain-of-thought reasoning with ChatGPT 3.5, Mixtral, and Aya, comparing their results with those of a state-of-the-art BERT classifier. These experiments outline that, even if large language models show a lower precision compared to the fine-tuned BERT classifier and, in some cases, they find hard-to-get slurs or colloquialisms, they still are sensitive to highly nuanced cases (particularly, homophobic/transphobic hate speech). We make our code and models publicly available for future research.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.400
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7174–7187
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.400/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Juan Manuel Pérez, Paula Miguel, and Viviana Cotik. 2025. Exploring Large Language Models for Hate Speech Detection in Rioplatense Spanish. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 7174–7187, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Large Language Models for Hate Speech Detection in Rioplatense Spanish (Pérez et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.400.pdf