Cascading versus Joint Modeling for Hierarchical Offensive Language Detection

Fine-grained offensive language detection organizes labels into a hierarchical structure, for which two modeling paradigms exist: cascaded decomposition and joint multi-task modeling. Prior work rarely provides a direct, controlled comparison of the two paradigms in terms of accuracy, parameter count, and inference latency, and rarely verifies whether a chosen class-imbalance handling strategy is actually optimal. This paper proposes a three-level cascaded detection system whose training strategy is customized per subtask, together with two verification mechanisms. First, a controlled ablation study determines the best class-imbalance handling strategy for each subtask. Second, a joint multi-task model with a shared encoder is trained as an architectural control, yielding real measurements along the dimensions of accuracy, parameter count, and inference latency. Experiments show that the cascaded system attains macro-F1 scores of 0.795, 0.716, and 0.557 on the three subtasks of the official test set. The ablation study reveals that configuring the loss function purely by imbalance-severity intuition is suboptimal; reconfiguring based on the ablation results improves both performance and stability. End-to-end cascade evaluation shows that roughly one-fifth of the errors in the cascade pipeline originate from the first-stage filter and cannot be corrected by subsequent stages. Relative to the joint multi-task model, the cascaded architecture achieves higher accuracy on all three subtasks, with a 7.1-point macro-F1 gain on the most severely imbalanced subtask, at the cost of three times the parameters and 1.67 times the inference latency. Together, these results establish an explicit, quantifiable trade-off between the accuracy advantage of cascaded architectures and their deployment cost.