Fine-Grained Emotions Influence on Implicit Hate Speech Detection

Recent years brought an exponential growth of social media which revolutionized freedom of speech but significantly increased the propagation of hate speech and hate-based activities. Therefore, constructive countermeasures are necessary to prevent escalating hateful content on online social media. Many recent works target explicit hate speech, but only a few studies have utilized multiple fused features such as sentiment, targets, and emotions as attributes to enhance the detection of hate speech. In general, sentiment features help to discern feelings such as positivity or negativity, and emotion features provide a deeper level of granularity, focusing on a more comprehensive understanding of sensitivities. The aim of this paper is to investigate the significance of incorporating fine-grained emotions as an essential feature in improving the classification of implicit hate speech. First, we analyzed emotion variations of hateful and non-hateful content and explored their major fine-grained emotion discrepancies targeting implicit hateful content. Next, we introduce a multi-task learning approach that integrates emotions and sentiment features to classify implicit expressions of hatred. To evaluate the effectiveness of our multi-task learning approach, we compared it with baseline models using single-task learning approaches. The experimental results show that our multi-task approach outperformed in classifying implicit hate speech compared to the baseline models and demonstrates that fine-grained emotional knowledge decreases the classification error across multiple implicit hate categories.