Can Prompting LLMs Unlock Hate Speech Detection Across Languages? a Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Study
MCML Authors
Faeze Ghorbanpour
Daryna Dementieva
Dr.
Alexander Fraser
Prof. Dr.
Core PI
Abstract
Faeze Ghorbanpour
Daryna Dementieva
Dr.
Alexander Fraser
Prof. Dr.
Core PI
Abstract
Despite growing interest in automated hate speech detection, most existing approaches overlook the linguistic diversity of online content. Multilingual instruction-tuned large language models such as LLaMA, Aya, Qwen, and BloomZ offer promising capabilities across languages, but their effectiveness in identifying hate speech through zero-shot and few-shot prompting remains underexplored. This work evaluates LLM prompting-based detection across eight non-English languages, utilizing several prompting techniques and comparing them to fine-tuned encoder models. We show that while zero-shot and few-shot prompting lag behind fine-tuned encoder models on most of the real-world evaluation sets, they achieve better generalization on functional tests for hate speech detection. Our study also reveals that prompt design plays a critical role, with each language often requiring customized prompting techniques to maximize performance.
inproceedings GDF+25
WOAH @ACL 2025
9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Vienna, Austria, Jul 27-Aug 01, 2025.Authors
F. Ghorbanpour • D. Dementieva • A. FraserLinks
URLResearch Area
BibTeXKey: GDF+25