Multilingual Resources for Offensive Language Detection

Abstract

Most of the published approaches and resources for offensive language and hate speech detection are tailored for the English language. In consequence, cross-lingual and cross-cultural perspectives lack some essential resources. The lack of diversity of the datasets in Spanish is notable. Variations throughout Spanish-speaking countries make existing datasets not enough to encompass the task in the different Spanish variants. We manually annotated 9834 tweets from Chile to enrich the existing Spanish resources with different words and new targets of hate that have not been considered in previous studies. We conducted several cross-dataset evaluation experiments of the models published in the literature using our Chilean dataset and two others in English and Spanish. We propose a comparative framework for quickly conducting comparative experiments using different previously published models. In addition, we set up a Codalab competition for further comparison of new models in a standard scenario, that is, data partitions and evaluation metrics. All resources can be accessed through a centralized repository for researchers to get a complete picture of the progress on the multilingual hate speech and offensive language detection task.