"Stop Asian Hate!" : Refining Detection of Anti-Asian Hate Speech During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Content warning: This work displays examples of explicit and/or strongly offensive language. Fueled by a surge of anti-Asian xenophobia and prejudice during the COVID-19 pandemic, many have taken to social media to express these negative sentiments. Identifying these posts is crucial for moderation and understanding the nature of hate in online spaces. In this paper, we create and annotate a corpus of tweets to explore anti-Asian hate speech with a finer level of granularity. Our analysis reveals that this emergent form of hate speech often eludes established approaches. To address this challenge, we develop a model and an accompanied efficient training regimen that incorporates agreement between annotators. Our approach produces up to 8.8% improvement in macro F1 scores over a strong established baseline, indicating its effectiveness even in settings where consensus among annotators is low. We demonstrate that we are able to identify hate speech that is systematically missed by established hate speech detectors.