@inproceedings{ayele-etal-2024-exploring,
    title = "Exploring Boundaries and Intensities in Offensive and Hate Speech: Unveiling the Complex Spectrum of Social Media Discourse",
    author = "Ayele, Abinew Ali  and
      Jalew, Esubalew Alemneh  and
      Ali, Adem Chanie  and
      Yimam, Seid Muhie  and
      Biemann, Chris",
    editor = "Kumar, Ritesh  and
      Ojha, Atul Kr.  and
      Malmasi, Shervin  and
      Chakravarthi, Bharathi Raja  and
      Lahiri, Bornini  and
      Singh, Siddharth  and
      Ratan, Shyam",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Threat, Aggression {\&} Cyberbullying @ LREC-COLING-2024",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.trac-1.17",
    pages = "167--178",
    abstract = "The prevalence of digital media and evolving sociopolitical dynamics have significantly amplified the dissemination of hateful content. Existing studies mainly focus on classifying texts into binary categories, often overlooking the continuous spectrum of offensiveness and hatefulness inherent in the text. In this research, we present an extensive benchmark dataset for Amharic, comprising 8,258 tweets annotated for three distinct tasks: category classification, identification of hate targets, and rating offensiveness and hatefulness intensities. Our study highlights that a considerable majority of tweets belong to the less offensive and less hate intensity levels, underscoring the need for early interventions by stakeholders. The prevalence of ethnic and political hatred targets, with significant overlaps in our dataset, emphasizes the complex relationships within Ethiopia{'}s sociopolitical landscape. We build classification and regression models and investigate the efficacy of models in handling these tasks. Our results reveal that hate and offensive speech can not be addressed by a simplistic binary classification, instead manifesting as variables across a continuous range of values. The afro-XLMR-large model exhibits the best performances achieving F1-scores of 75.30{\%}, 70.59{\%}, and 29.42{\%} for the category, target, and regression tasks, respectively. The 80.22{\%} correlation coefficient of the Afro-XLMR-large model indicates strong alignments.",
}

The prevalence of digital media and evolving sociopolitical dynamics have significantly amplified the dissemination of hateful content. Existing studies mainly focus on classifying texts into binary categories, often overlooking the continuous spectrum of offensiveness and hatefulness inherent in the text. In this research, we present an extensive benchmark dataset for Amharic, comprising 8,258 tweets annotated for three distinct tasks: category classification, identification of hate targets, and rating offensiveness and hatefulness intensities. Our study highlights that a considerable majority of tweets belong to the less offensive and less hate intensity levels, underscoring the need for early interventions by stakeholders. The prevalence of ethnic and political hatred targets, with significant overlaps in our dataset, emphasizes the complex relationships within Ethiopia{'}s sociopolitical landscape. We build classification and regression models and investigate the efficacy of models in handling these tasks. Our results reveal that hate and offensive speech can not be addressed by a simplistic binary classification, instead manifesting as variables across a continuous range of values. The afro-XLMR-large model exhibits the best performances achieving F1-scores of 75.30{\%}, 70.59{\%}, and 29.42{\%} for the category, target, and regression tasks, respectively. The 80.22{\%} correlation coefficient of the Afro-XLMR-large model indicates strong alignments.
Ayele, Abinew Ali Jalew, Esubalew Alemneh Ali, Adem Chanie Yimam, Seid Muhie Biemann, Chris
Exploring Boundaries and Intensities in Offensive and Hate Speech: Unveiling the Complex Spectrum of Social Media Discourse