# From Abusive Language Classification to Sequence Labeling Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06287 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06287/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [HateTinyLLM : Hate Speech Detection Using Tiny Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01577/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Industrial content moderation must process massive message streams under tight latency constraints, yet most abusive language (AL) detection systems rely on sentence-level classification (ALC), which neither localizes abusive spans nor identifies who is targeted. We define Abusive Language Identification (ALI) as a sequence-labeling task that jointly extracts AL spans and target mentions, and assess whether this approach can be used for text moderation. On a pilot corpus drawn from a production moderation pipeline, we compare ALI with ALC on cross-domain generalization and implicit abuse, and we also evaluate AL and target span detection. ALI remains competitive with ALC while providing localized outputs for moderators, with a modest and configuration-sensitive advantage on implicit abuse. Exact AL boundaries and target spans remain difficult to recover. We complement this comparison with a qualitative analysis and discuss perspectives on complete target--span linking and on structured benchmarks for ALI.