Overview of the HASOC Subtrack at FIRE 2021: Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in English and Indo-Aryan Languages
This work addresses the societal problem of online hate speech by providing evaluation tools for AI moderation, but it is incremental as it extends existing benchmark efforts to new languages and tasks.
The paper tackled the problem of identifying hate speech and offensive content online by presenting a benchmark dataset and competition for English, Hindi, and Marathi, with the best classification algorithms achieving F1 scores of 0.91 for Marathi, 0.78 for Hindi, and 0.83 for English in binary classification tasks.
The widespread of offensive content online such as hate speech poses a growing societal problem. AI tools are necessary for supporting the moderation process at online platforms. For the evaluation of these identification tools, continuous experimentation with data sets in different languages are necessary. The HASOC track (Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification) is dedicated to develop benchmark data for this purpose. This paper presents the HASOC subtrack for English, Hindi, and Marathi. The data set was assembled from Twitter. This subtrack has two sub-tasks. Task A is a binary classification problem (Hate and Not Offensive) offered for all three languages. Task B is a fine-grained classification problem for three classes (HATE) Hate speech, OFFENSIVE and PROFANITY offered for English and Hindi. Overall, 652 runs were submitted by 65 teams. The performance of the best classification algorithms for task A are F1 measures 0.91, 0.78 and 0.83 for Marathi, Hindi and English, respectively. This overview presents the tasks and the data development as well as the detailed results. The systems submitted to the competition applied a variety of technologies. The best performing algorithms were mainly variants of transformer architectures.