Zahra Bokaei
2025
Culture Matters in Toxic Language Detection in Persian
Zahra Bokaei
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Walid Magdy
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Bonnie Webber
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Toxic language detection is crucial for creating safer online environments and limiting the spread of harmful content. While toxic language detection has been under-explored in Persian, the current work compares different methods for this task, including fine-tuning, data enrichment, zero-shot and few-shot learning, and cross-lingual transfer learning. What is especially compelling is the impact of cultural context on transfer learning for this task: We show that the language of a country with cultural similarities to Persian yields better results in transfer learning. Conversely, the improvement is lower when the language comes from a culturally distinct country.