# Towards Generalized Offensive Language Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.18738 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18738/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Nuanced Metrics for Measuring Unintended Bias with Real Data for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04561/) (2019)
- [Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09666/) (2019)
- [Racial Bias in Hate Speech and Abusive Language Detection Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12516/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2019 Task 6: Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media (OffensEval)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08983/) (2019)
- [HateBERT: Retraining BERT for Abusive Language Detection in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12472/) (2020)
- [A New Generation of Perspective API: Efficient Multilingual Character-level Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11176/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT better than Human Annotators? Potential and Limitations of ChatGPT in Explaining Implicit Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07736/) (2023)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 12: Multilingual Offensive Language Identification in Social Media (OffensEval 2020)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07235/) (2020)
- [A Benchmark Dataset for Learning to Intervene in Online Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04251/) (2019)
- [Understanding Abuse: A Typology of Abusive Language Detection Subtasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09899/) (2017)
- [How Can We Accelerate Progress Towards Human-like Linguistic Generalization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00955/) (2020)
- [Multilingual Offensive Language Identification with Cross-lingual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05324/) (2020)
- [Memorization vs. Generalization: Quantifying Data Leakage in NLP Performance Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01818/) (2021)
- [All You Need is "Love": Evading Hate-speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09115/) (2018)
- ["HOT" ChatGPT: The promise of ChatGPT in detecting and discriminating hateful, offensive, and toxic comments on social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10619/) (2023)
- [Detecting Hate Speech in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06427/) (2017)
- [Developing a Multilingual Annotated Corpus of Misogyny and Aggression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07428/) (2020)
- [Efficient Hierarchical Domain Adaptation for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08786/) (2021)
- [Detecting Cross-Geographic Biases in Toxicity Modeling on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06999/) (2021)
- [MUDES: Multilingual Detection of Offensive Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09665/) (2021)
- [FBERT: A Neural Transformer for Identifying Offensive Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05074/) (2021)
- [Vicarious Offense and Noise Audit of Offensive Speech Classifiers: Unifying Human and Machine Disagreement on What is Offensive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12534/) (2023)
- [An Exploratory Analysis of the Relation Between Offensive Language and Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14888/) (2021)
- [Are Chess Discussions Racist? An Adversarial Hate Speech Data Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10280/) (2020)
- [LAGr: Labeling Aligned Graphs for Improving Systematic Generalization in Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07572/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Do You Feel Comfortable? Detecting Hidden Conversational Escalation in AI Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06193/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The prevalence of offensive content on the internet, encompassing hate speech and cyberbullying, is a pervasive issue worldwide. Consequently, it has garnered significant attention from the machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) communities. As a result, numerous systems have been developed to automatically identify potentially harmful content and mitigate its impact. These systems can follow two approaches; (1) Use publicly available models and application endpoints, including prompting large language models (LLMs) (2) Annotate datasets and train ML models on them. However, both approaches lack an understanding of how generalizable they are. Furthermore, the applicability of these systems is often questioned in off-domain and practical environments. This paper empirically evaluates the generalizability of offensive language detection models and datasets across a novel generalized benchmark. We answer three research questions on generalizability. Our findings will be useful in creating robust real-world offensive language detection systems.