# "Define Your Terms" : Enhancing Efficient Offensive Speech Classification with Definition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03221 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03221/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04009/) (2017)
- [HateXplain: A Benchmark Dataset for Explainable Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10289/) (2020)
- [Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03891/) (2019)
- [Meta-Dataset: A Dataset of Datasets for Learning to Learn from Few Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03096/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Data and its (dis)contents: A survey of dataset development and use in machine learning research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05345/) (2020)
- [Learning from the Worst: Dynamically Generated Datasets to Improve Online Hate Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15761/) (2020)
- [Latent Hatred: A Benchmark for Understanding Implicit Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05322/) (2021)
- [HateBERT: Retraining BERT for Abusive Language Detection in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12472/) (2020)
- [Directions in Abusive Language Training Data: Garbage In, Garbage Out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01670/) (2020)
- [PTE: Predictive Text Embedding through Large-scale Heterogeneous Text Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00200/) (2015)
- [A BERT-Based Transfer Learning Approach for Hate Speech Detection in Online Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12574/) (2019)
- [Joint Embedding of Words and Labels for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04174/) (2018)
- [Don't Blame the Annotator: Bias Already Starts in the Annotation Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00415/) (2022)
- [Large-Scale Hate Speech Detection with Cross-Domain Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01111/) (2022)
- [Aggression-annotated Corpus of Hindi-English Code-mixed Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09402/) (2018)
- [Detecting East Asian Prejudice on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03909/) (2020)
- [Racism is a Virus: Anti-Asian Hate and Counterspeech in Social Media during the COVID-19 Crisis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12423/) (2020)
- [FBERT: A Neural Transformer for Identifying Offensive Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05074/) (2021)
- [How to Train Your MAML to Excel in Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16245/) (2021)
- [Students Need More Attention: BERT-based AttentionModel for Small Data with Application to AutomaticPatient Message Triage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11991/) (2020)
- [HABERTOR: An Efficient and Effective Deep Hatespeech Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08865/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Untangling Hate Speech Definitions: A Semantic Componential Analysis Across Cultures and Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07417/) (2024)
- [HateCOT: An Explanation-Enhanced Dataset for Generalizable Offensive Speech Detection via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11456/) (2024)
- [Let Guidelines Guide You: A Prescriptive Guideline-Centered Data Annotation Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14099/) (2024)
- [Algorithmic Fairness in NLP: Persona-Infused LLMs for Human-Centric Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19331/) (2025)
- [From Ground Trust to Truth: Disparities in Offensive Language Judgments on Contemporary Korean Political Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14712/) (2025)
- [SMARTER: A Data-efficient Framework to Improve Toxicity Detection with Explanation via Self-augmenting Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15174/) (2025)
- [Improving Implicit Hate Speech Detection via a Community-Driven Multi-Agent Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09342/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The propagation of offensive content through social media channels has garnered attention of the research community. Multiple works have proposed various semantically related yet subtle distinct categories of offensive speech. In this work, we explore meta-earning approaches to leverage the diversity of offensive speech corpora to enhance their reliable and efficient detection. We propose a joint embedding architecture that incorporates the input's label and definition for classification via Prototypical Network. Our model achieves at least 75% of the maximal F1-score while using less than 10% of the available training data across 4 datasets. Our experimental findings also provide a case study of training strategies valuable to combat resource scarcity.