Speech Detection Task Against Asian Hate: BERT the Central, While Data-Centric Studies the Crucial
This work addresses the urgent problem of detecting anti-Asian hate speech online, particularly during the pandemic, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods (BERT fine-tuning) to a new dataset.
The authors tackled hate speech detection against Asians during COVID-19 by creating COVID-HATE-2022, a dataset of 2,025 annotated tweets, and fine-tuning BERT with model-centric and data-centric approaches, finding that data-centric strategies generally improved performance and outperformed others.
With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing, hatred against Asians is intensifying in countries outside Asia, especially among the Chinese. There is an urgent need to detect and prevent hate speech towards Asians effectively. In this work, we first create COVID-HATE-2022, an annotated dataset including 2,025 annotated tweets fetched in early February 2022, which are labeled based on specific criteria, and we present the comprehensive collection of scenarios of hate and non-hate tweets in the dataset. Second, we fine-tune the BERT model based on the relevant datasets and demonstrate several strategies related to the "cleaning" of the tweets. Third, we investigate the performance of advanced fine-tuning strategies with various model-centric and data-centric approaches, and we show that both strategies generally improve the performance, while data-centric ones outperform the others, and it demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the data-centric approaches in the associated tasks.