Combating high variance in Data-Scarce Implicit Hate Speech Classification

Abstract

Hate speech classification has been a long-standing problem in natural language processing. However, even though there are numerous hate speech detection methods, they usually overlook a lot of hateful statements due to them being implicit in nature. Developing datasets to aid in the task of implicit hate speech classification comes with its own challenges; difficulties are nuances in language, varying definitions of what constitutes hate speech, and the labor-intensive process of annotating such data. This had led to a scarcity of data available to train and test such systems, which gives rise to high variance problems when parameter-heavy transformer-based models are used to address the problem. In this paper, we explore various optimization and regularization techniques and develop a novel RoBERTa-based model that achieves state-of-the-art performance.