Perspectives on Hate: General vs. Domain-Specific Models

The rise of online hostility, combined with broad social media use, leads to the necessity of the comprehension of its human impact. However, the process of hate identification is challenging because, on the one hand, the line between healthy disagreement and poisonous speech is not well defined, and, on the other hand, multiple socio-cultural factors or prior beliefs shape people’s perceptions of potentially harmful text. To address disagreements in hate speech identification, Natural Language Processing (NLP) models must capture several perspectives. This paper introduces a strategy based on the Contrastive Learning paradigm for detecting disagreements in hate speech using pre-trained language models. Two approaches are proposed: the General Model, a comprehensive framework, and the Domain-Specific Model, which focuses on more specific hate-related tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/MIND-Lab/Perspectives-on-Hate.