HABERTOR: An Efficient and Effective Deep Hatespeech Detector

Thanh Tran, Yifan Hu, Changwei Hu, Kevin Yen, Fei Tan, Kyumin Lee, Se Rim Park


Abstract
We present our HABERTOR model for detecting hatespeech in large scale user-generated content. Inspired by the recent success of the BERT model, we propose several modifications to BERT to enhance the performance on the downstream hatespeech classification task. HABERTOR inherits BERT’s architecture, but is different in four aspects: (i) it generates its own vocabularies and is pre-trained from the scratch using the largest scale hatespeech dataset; (ii) it consists of Quaternion-based factorized components, resulting in a much smaller number of parameters, faster training and inferencing, as well as less memory usage; (iii) it uses our proposed multi-source ensemble heads with a pooling layer for separate input sources, to further enhance its effectiveness; and (iv) it uses a regularized adversarial training with our proposed fine-grained and adaptive noise magnitude to enhance its robustness. Through experiments on the large-scale real-world hatespeech dataset with 1.4M annotated comments, we show that HABERTOR works better than 15 state-of-the-art hatespeech detection methods, including fine-tuning Language Models. In particular, comparing with BERT, our HABERTOR is 4 5 times faster in the training/inferencing phase, uses less than 1/3 of the memory, and has better performance, even though we pre-train it by using less than 1% of the number of words. Our generalizability analysis shows that HABERTOR transfers well to other unseen hatespeech datasets and is a more efficient and effective alternative to BERT for the hatespeech classification.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.606
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7486–7502
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.606
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.606
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thanh Tran, Yifan Hu, Changwei Hu, Kevin Yen, Fei Tan, Kyumin Lee, and Se Rim Park. 2020. HABERTOR: An Efficient and Effective Deep Hatespeech Detector. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 7486–7502, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HABERTOR: An Efficient and Effective Deep Hatespeech Detector (Tran et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.606.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939273