STATE ToxiCN: A Benchmark for Span-level Target-Aware Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection

Zewen Bai, Liang Yang, Shengdi Yin, Junyu Lu, Jingjie Zeng, Haohao Zhu, Yuanyuan Sun, Hongfei Lin


Abstract
The proliferation of hate speech has caused significant harm to society. The intensity and directionality of hate are closely tied to the target and argument it is associated with. However, research on hate speech detection in Chinese has lagged behind, and existing datasets lack span-level fine-grained annotations. Furthermore, the lack of research on Chinese hateful slang poses a significant challenge. In this paper, we provide two valuable fine-grained Chinese hate speech detection research resources. First, we construct a Span-level Target-Aware Toxicity Extraction dataset (STATE ToxiCN), which is the first span-level Chinese hate speech dataset. Secondly, we evaluate the span-level hate speech detection performance of existing models using STATE ToxiCN. Finally, we conduct the first study on Chinese hateful slang and evaluate the ability of LLMs to understand hate semantics. Our work contributes valuable resources and insights to advance span-level hate speech detection in Chinese.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.532
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venues:
Findings | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
10206–10219
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.532/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zewen Bai, Liang Yang, Shengdi Yin, Junyu Lu, Jingjie Zeng, Haohao Zhu, Yuanyuan Sun, and Hongfei Lin. 2025. STATE ToxiCN: A Benchmark for Span-level Target-Aware Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 10206–10219, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
STATE ToxiCN: A Benchmark for Span-level Target-Aware Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection (Bai et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.532.pdf