A substantial portion of offensive content on social media is directed towards women. Since the approaches for general offensive content detection face a challenge in detecting misogynistic content, it requires solutions tailored to address offensive content against women. To this end, we propose a novel multimodal framework for the detection of misogynistic and sexist content. The framework comprises three modules: the Multimodal Attention module (MANM), the Graph-based Feature Reconstruction Module (GFRM), and the Content-specific Features Learning Module (CFLM). The MANM employs adaptive gating-based multimodal context-aware attention, enabling the model to focus on relevant visual and textual information and generating contextually relevant features. The GFRM module utilizes graphs to refine features within individual modalities, while the CFLM focuses on learning text and image-specific features such as toxicity features and caption features. Additionally, we curate a set of misogynous lexicons to compute the misogyny-specific lexicon score from the text. We apply test-time augmentation in feature space to better generalize the predictions on diverse inputs. The performance of the proposed approach has been evaluated on two multimodal datasets, MAMI and MMHS150K, with 11,000 and 13,494 samples, respectively. The proposed method demonstrates an average improvement of 10.17% and 8.88% in macro-F1 over existing methods on the MAMI and MMHS150K datasets, respectively.

In this study, we introduce the process for creating BiaSWE, an expert-annotated dataset tailored for misogyny detection in the Swedish language. To address the cultural and linguistic specificity of misogyny in Swedish, we collaborated with experts from the social sciences and humanities. Our interdisciplinary team developed a rigorous annotation process, incorporating both domain knowledge and language expertise, to capture the nuances of misogyny in a Swedish context. This methodology ensures that the dataset is not only culturally relevant but also aligned with broader efforts in bias detection for low-resource languages. The dataset, along with the annotation guidelines, is publicly available for further research.

Misogyny is often expressed through figurative language. Some neutral words can assume a negative connotation when functioning as pejorative epithets. Disambiguating the meaning of such terms might help the detection of misogyny. In order to address such task, we present PejorativITy, a novel corpus of 1,200 manually annotated Italian tweets for pejorative language at the word level and misogyny at the sentence level. We evaluate the impact of injecting information about disambiguated words into a model targeting misogyny detection. In particular, we explore two different approaches for injection: concatenation of pejorative information and substitution of ambiguous words with univocal terms. Our experimental results, both on our corpus and on two popular benchmarks on Italian tweets, show that both approaches lead to a major classification improvement, indicating that word sense disambiguation is a promising preliminary step for misogyny detection. Furthermore, we investigate LLMs' understanding of pejorative epithets by means of contextual word embeddings analysis and prompting.

The problems of online hate speech and cyberbullying have significantly worsened since the increase in popularity of social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter (X). Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have proven to provide a great advantage in automatic filtering such toxic content. Women are disproportionately more likely to be victims of online abuse. However, there appears to be a lack of studies that tackle misogyny detection in under-resourced languages. In this short paper, we present a novel dataset of YouTube comments in mix-code Hinglish collected from YouTube videos which have been weak labelled as `Misogynistic' and `Non-misogynistic'. Pre-processing and Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) techniques have been applied on the dataset to gain insights on its characteristics. The process has provided a better understanding of the dataset through sentiment scores, word clouds, etc.

Using novel approaches to dataset development, the Biasly dataset captures the nuance and subtlety of misogyny in ways that are unique within the literature. Built in collaboration with multi-disciplinary experts and annotators themselves, the dataset contains annotations of movie subtitles, capturing colloquial expressions of misogyny in North American film. The dataset can be used for a range of NLP tasks, including classification, severity score regression, and text generation for rewrites. In this paper, we discuss the methodology used, analyze the annotations obtained, and provide baselines using common NLP algorithms in the context of misogyny detection and mitigation. We hope this work will promote AI for social good in NLP for bias detection, explanation, and removal.