EkoHate: Abusive Language and Hate Speech Detection for Code-switched Political Discussions on Nigerian Twitter
Comfort Ilevbare, Jesujoba Alabi, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Firdous Bakare, Oluwatoyin Abiola, Oluwaseyi Adeyemo
Abstract
Nigerians have a notable online presence and actively discuss political and topical matters. This was particularly evident throughout the 2023 general election, where Twitter was used for campaigning, fact-checking and verification, and even positive and negative discourse. However, little or none has been done in the detection of abusive language and hate speech in Nigeria. In this paper, we curated code-switched Twitter data directed at three musketeers of the governorship election on the most populous and economically vibrant state in Nigeria; Lagos state, with the view to detect offensive speech in political discussions. We developed EkoHate—an abusive language and hate speech dataset for political discussions between the three candidates and their followers using a binary (normal vs offensive) and fine-grained four-label annotation scheme. We analysed our dataset and provided an empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods across both supervised and cross-lingual transfer learning settings. In the supervised setting, our evaluation results in both binary and four-label annotation schemes show that we can achieve 95.1 and 70.3 F1 points respectively. Furthermore, we show that our dataset adequately transfers very well to three publicly available offensive datasets (OLID, HateUS2020, and FountaHate), generalizing to political discussions in other regions like the US.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.woah-1.3
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2024)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Editors:
- Yi-Ling Chung, Zeerak Talat, Debora Nozza, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Paul Röttger, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Agostina Calabrese
- Venues:
- WOAH | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 28–37
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.woah-1.3
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.woah-1.3
- Cite (ACL):
- Comfort Ilevbare, Jesujoba Alabi, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Firdous Bakare, Oluwatoyin Abiola, and Oluwaseyi Adeyemo. 2024. EkoHate: Abusive Language and Hate Speech Detection for Code-switched Political Discussions on Nigerian Twitter. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2024), pages 28–37, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- EkoHate: Abusive Language and Hate Speech Detection for Code-switched Political Discussions on Nigerian Twitter (Ilevbare et al., WOAH-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.woah-1.3.pdf