HODIAT : a dataset for detecting homotransphobic hate speech in Italian with aggressiveness and target annotation

Publication type
C1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Damo, G., Cignarella, ATC, Caselli, T., Patti, V., & Nozza, D.
Editor
Agostina Calabrese, Christine de Kock, Debora Nozza, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Zeerak Talat and Francielle Vargas
Series
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Pagination
124-135
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Conference
9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) (Vienna, Austria)
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Abstract

The escalating spread of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric in both online and offline spaces has become a growing global concern, with Italy standing out as one of the countries where acts of violence against LGBTQIA+ individuals persist and increase year after year. This short paper study analyzes hateful language against LGBTQIA+ individuals in Italian using novel annotation labels for aggressiveness and target. We assess a range of multilingual and Italian language models on this newannotation layers across zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings. The results reveal significant performance gaps across models and settings, highlighting the limitations of zero- and few-shot approaches and the importance of fine-tuning on labelled data, when available, to achieve high prediction performance.