Finding hate speech with auxiliary emotion detection from self-training multi-label learning perspective

Abstract

Hate Speech Detection (HSD) aims to identify whether a text contains hate speech content, which often refers to discrimination and is even associated with a hate crime. The mainstream methods jointly train the HSD problem with relevant auxiliary problems, e.g., emotion detection and sentiment analysis, under the paradigm of Multi-Task Learning (MTL). In this paper, we improve HSD by integrating it with emotion detection, since we take inspiration from the potential correlations between hate speech and certain negative emotion states, which have been studied theoretically and empirically. To be specific, we can concatenate their hateful labels and predicted emotion states as pseudo-multiple labels for hate speech samples, formulating a pseudo-Multi-Label Learning (MLL) problem. Beyond the existing MTL-HSD methods, we further incorporate this pseudo-MLL problem and solve it by capturing the correlations between hate speech and negative emotion states, so as to improve the performance of HSD. Based on these ideas, we propose a novel HSD method named the Emotion-correlated Hate Speech DetectOR (EHSor). We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate EHSor, and the results show that it can consistently outperform the existing HSD methods across benchmark datasets.