arXiv AI

Hate Speech Classification In Roman Urdu: A Comparative Study On Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning And Prompt Engineering

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Efficient Adaptation of LLMs for Hate Speech Detection in Low-Resource Languages: A Comparative Study on Roman Urdu

The paper evaluates large language models for hate‑speech detection in Roman Urdu, a low‑resource language with informal spelling variations. Using the Parameter‑Efficient Fine‑Tuning technique Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the authors fine‑tune models such as Mistral, LLaMA, Falcon, and multilingual BERT on the 72,000‑comment PURUTT dataset. While zero‑shot performance yields an F1 of 0.56, fine‑tuning a small fraction of parameters boosts F1 scores above 0.93, demonstrating that PEFT offers both high accuracy and computational efficiency for low‑resource language tasks.

By Toneema Zubair, Muhammad Junaid Asif, Faisal Kamiran, Hafiz Hassan Saeed, Rana Fayyaz Ahmad
arXiv AI
Aug 26

'Ghaib in Translation' aka Unseen Harm: Measuring Cross-Script Safety Inconsistency with 'Missed-in-Urdu' Scores in LLM Hate Speech Detection

The paper "Ghaib in Translation" investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle Urdu, a widely spoken language that is largely absent from safety evaluations. Five prominent LLMs—GPT‑4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Qwen‑2.5, and Llama‑3.1—were tested on six datasets covering Nastaliq Urdu, Roman Urdu, English, and code‑switched Urdu‑English. The study found significant label instability between original‑script and English‑translation classifications, with missed‑in‑Urdu rates ranging from 2.4% to 9.9% (median 4.3%). A review of 205 papers across nine ALW/WOAH editions revealed no dedicated Urdu research, underscoring the language’s neglect in current safety research.

By Fawzia Zehra (Fuzzy), Kara-Isitt, Sonal Khosla, Stephen Swift
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

From Specialization to Generalization: Instruction-tuned LLMs for Robust Harmful Content Mitigation

The paper presents an instruction‑tuned large language model (LLM) based on Qwen3 that is fine‑tuned for hate speech mitigation by unifying 36 English hate speech datasets. The authors show that this generalist LLM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on in‑domain benchmarks and delivers significant gains in cross‑domain and cross‑lingual generalization, outperforming specialist encoder‑based classifiers.

By Lukas Edman, Daryna Dementieva, Alexander Fraser
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Training-Time Explainability for Multilingual Hate Speech Detection: Aligning Model Reasoning with Human Rationales

The paper proposes a training‑time explainability framework that aligns model reasoning with human‑annotated rationales to improve both classification performance and interpretability for multilingual hate speech detection. It is evaluated on HateXplain (English) and BullySent (Hinglish), datasets that capture anti‑Muslim hate in culturally coded, multilingual forms. Using methods such as LIME, Integrated Gradients, Grad‑X‑Input, and attention, the study shows that gradient‑ and attention‑based regularization boosts F‑scores, enhances plausibility and faithfulness, and captures culturally specific cues for detecting implicit anti‑Muslim hate.

By Muhammad Deedahwar Mazhar Qureshi, Sannaan Khan, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Wael Rashwan
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

To Jev or Not? Evaluating the Accuracy and Efficiency of Structured Decision Models for Hate-Speech Moderation

The paper evaluates six structured decision models for hate‑speech moderation across four datasets, comparing them to specialized, zero‑shot, commercial, and supervised baselines. It investigates whether providing dataset definitions or decomposing them into multiple questions improves classification, and measures latency and cost. Results show that commercial LLMs outperform decision models on only one dataset, definitions alter up to 28% of predictions without consistent gains, and decomposition helps in only 20% of cases, yet the best hosted decision model approaches the best commercial LLM’s performance with roughly 97% lower inference cost.

By Demetris Paschalides, George Pallis, Marios D. Dikaiakos
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Register Shifts Break LLM Safety: A Bengali Benchmark with Culturally Grounded Harms

The paper introduces BanglaSafe, a benchmark of 879 Bengali prompts that covers 17 culturally grounded harm categories and five prompting conditions. Evaluation of 18 frontier LLMs shows that 53.6% of responses are unsafe or partially unsafe, with 14.7% containing strictly harmful content. The study finds that the writing style within Bengali has a stronger impact on safety than the language switch itself, and that current safety classifiers struggle to reliably evaluate Bengali content.

By Naymul Islam, Nusrat Jahan Lia, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Sabik Bin Sultan, Abdullah Khan Zehady