Uncertainty-Aware Cross-Modal Alignment for Hate Speech Detection

Chuanpeng Yang, Fuqing Zhu, Yaxin Liu, Jizhong Han, Songlin Hu


Abstract
Hate speech detection has become an urgent task with the emergence of huge multimodal harmful content (, memes) on social media platforms. Previous studies mainly focus on complex feature extraction and fusion to learn discriminative information from memes. However, these methods ignore two key points: 1) the misalignment of image and text in memes caused by the modality gap, and 2) the uncertainty between modalities caused by the contribution degree of each modality to hate sentiment. To this end, this paper proposes an uncertainty-aware cross-modal alignment (UCA) framework for modeling the misalignment and uncertainty in multimodal hate speech detection. Specifically, we first utilize the cross-modal feature encoder to capture image and text feature representations in memes. Then, a cross-modal alignment module is applied to reduce semantic gaps between modalities by aligning the feature representations. Next, a cross-modal fusion module is designed to learn semantic interactions between modalities to capture cross-modal correlations, providing complementary features for memes. Finally, a cross-modal uncertainty learning module is proposed, which evaluates the divergence between unimodal feature distributions to to balance unimodal and cross-modal fusion features. Extensive experiments on five publicly available datasets show that the proposed UCA produces a competitive performance compared with the existing multimodal hate speech detection methods.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1475
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
16973–16983
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1475
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chuanpeng Yang, Fuqing Zhu, Yaxin Liu, Jizhong Han, and Songlin Hu. 2024. Uncertainty-Aware Cross-Modal Alignment for Hate Speech Detection. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 16973–16983, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Uncertainty-Aware Cross-Modal Alignment for Hate Speech Detection (Yang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2024.lrec-main.1475.pdf