Exploring multi-task multi-lingual learning of transformer models for hate speech and offensive speech identification in social media

Thus, social media platforms are often held responsible for framing the views and opinions of a large number of people (Duggan et al., 2017). However, this freedom to voice our opinion has been challenged by the increase in the use of hate speech (Mondal et al., 2017). The anonymity of the internet grants people the power to completely change the context of a discussion and suppress a person's personal opinion (Sticca and Perren, 2013). These hateful posts and comments not only affect the society at a micro scale but also at a global level by influencing people's views regarding important global events like elections, and protests (Duggan et al., 2017). Given the volume of online communication happening on various social media platforms and the need for more fruitful communication, there is a growing need to automate the detection of hate speech. For the scope of this paper we adopt the definition of hate speech and offensive speech as defined in the Mandl et al. (2019) as "insulting, hurtful, derogatory, or obscene content directed from one person to another person" (quoted from (Mandl et al., 2019)). In order to automate hate speech detection the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has made significant progress which has been accelerated by organization of numerous shared tasks aimed at identifying hate speech (Mandl et al., 2019; Kumar et al., 2020, 2018).