HateCOT: An Explanation-Enhanced Dataset for Generalizable Offensive Speech Detection via Large Language Models
This addresses the need for reliable detection of offensive content on social media, though it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets and methods.
The paper tackles the problem of poor generalization in offensive speech detection by introducing HateCOT, a dataset with over 52,000 samples and explanations, which significantly enhances the performance of open-source Large Language Models on benchmark datasets in zero-shot and few-shot settings.
The widespread use of social media necessitates reliable and efficient detection of offensive content to mitigate harmful effects. Although sophisticated models perform well on individual datasets, they often fail to generalize due to varying definitions and labeling of "offensive content." In this paper, we introduce HateCOT, an English dataset with over 52,000 samples from diverse sources, featuring explanations generated by GPT-3.5Turbo and curated by humans. We demonstrate that pretraining on HateCOT significantly enhances the performance of open-source Large Language Models on three benchmark datasets for offensive content detection in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, despite differences in domain and task. Additionally, HateCOT facilitates effective K-shot fine-tuning of LLMs with limited data and improves the quality of their explanations, as confirmed by our human evaluation.