arXiv Computation and Language

The Surge of Anti-Semitism in German Social Media following the October 7 Attacks

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Agentic Detection of Online Conspiracies

The paper presents an agentic framework for detecting conspiratorial content in social media by inferring the speaker’s intent rather than merely identifying explicit claims. It leverages social context and adaptive tool use, demonstrating superior performance over text-only and non-agentic models on a large Hebrew tweet dataset spanning election cycles and the COVID pandemic. The study highlights the importance of context-aware, reasoning-driven approaches for accurate conspiracy detection.

By Lior Biton, Oren Tsur
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Global Crises and National Policies: A Large Scale Analysis of Political Content in German Language Online Media

The study analyzes millions of German-language online articles and tweets from 2019–2022 to uncover political biases using automated text analysis. It finds that international events such as the COVID‑19 pandemic and the Ukraine war create thematic convergence between German and Swiss media, while domestic policy differences drive divergence in locally focused topics. Newspapers maintain more stable political content, whereas Twitter shows rapid, event‑driven spikes, illustrating how media platforms differ in intensity and timing.

By Yara D\"oring, Felix Bie{\ss}mann
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Posts of Peril: Detecting Information About Hazards in Text

arXiv:2405. 17838v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Socio-linguistic indicators of affectively-relevant phenomena, such as emotion or sentiment, are often extracted from text to better understand features of human-computer interactions, including on social media.

By Keith Burghardt, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Chyna Tang, Anne Pisor, Kristina Lerman
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Beyond Accuracy: A Qualitative Analysis of Vision-Language Models for Hate Speech Detection in Memes

The paper examines how four leading vision‑language models—LLaVA‑7B, Qwen‑VL, GPT‑4o mini, and Claude 3 Haiku—perform in detecting hateful content within memes. It evaluates the models under zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting, focusing not only on classification accuracy but also on the qualitative justifications they generate. The study highlights that these models often overlook contextual nuances, irony, and subtle cues essential for accurately identifying hate speech in memes.

By Muhammad Jawad Chowdhury, Adiba Hasan, Ishrak Hossain, Shahriar Ivan, Sabbir Ahmed
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

AHA-Memes: A Fine-Grained Multimodal Benchmark for Understanding Hate in Arabic Memes

Hateful memes are a growing form of multimodal online harm, where hostile intent is often conveyed through the joint interpretation of images, text, cultural references, and implicit targets. While hateful meme detection has advanced in high-resource languages, Arabic remains underexplored, with existing meme resources focusing mainly on propaganda or coarse harmful-content labels.