# How to Solve Few-Shot Abusive Content Detection Using the Data We Actually Have

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14081 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14081/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [AdapterFusion: Non-Destructive Task Composition for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00247/) (2020)
- [Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09666/) (2019)
- [Large Scale Crowdsourcing and Characterization of Twitter Abusive Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00393/) (2018)
- [HateCheck: Functional Tests for Hate Speech Detection Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15606/) (2020)
- [Hate Speech Dataset from a White Supremacy Forum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04444/) (2018)
- [OpenPrompt: An Open-source Framework for Prompt-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01998/) (2021)
- [Directions in Abusive Language Training Data: Garbage In, Garbage Out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01670/) (2020)
- [Multilingual and Multi-Aspect Hate Speech Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11049/) (2019)
- [Multilingual Offensive Language Identification with Cross-lingual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05324/) (2020)
- [Bridging Multi-Task Learning and Meta-Learning: Towards Efficient Training and Effective Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09017/) (2021)
- [Discrete and Soft Prompting for Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03630/) (2021)
- [Toxic Language Detection in Social Media for Brazilian Portuguese: New Dataset and Multilingual Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04543/) (2020)
- [A Closer Look at Few-Shot Crosslingual Transfer: The Choice of Shots Matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15682/) (2020)
- [FewNLU: Benchmarking State-of-the-Art Methods for Few-Shot Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12742/) (2021)
- [Learning Label Modular Prompts for Text Classification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17142/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to the broad range of social media platforms, the requirements of abusive language detection systems are varied and ever-changing. Already a large set of annotated corpora with different properties and label sets were created, such as hate or misogyny detection, but the form and targets of abusive speech are constantly evolving. Since, the annotation of new corpora is expensive, in this work we leverage datasets we already have, covering a wide range of tasks related to abusive language detection. Our goal is to build models cheaply for a new target label set and/or language, using only a few training examples of the target domain. We propose a two-step approach: first we train our model in a multitask fashion. We then carry out few-shot adaptation to the target requirements. Our experiments show that using already existing datasets and only a few-shots of the target task the performance of models improve both monolingually and across languages. Our analysis also shows that our models acquire a general understanding of abusive language, since they improve the prediction of labels which are present only in the target dataset and can benefit from knowledge about labels which are not directly used for the target task.