An Investigation of Large Language Models for Real-World Hate Speech Detection

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of large language models with innovative prompting strategies for more accurate, context-aware hate speech detection, outperforming traditional models across multiple datasets.

Contribution

It introduces four novel prompting strategies for LLMs, demonstrating their effectiveness in capturing context and improving hate speech detection accuracy.

Findings

LLMs often outperform traditional machine learning models in hate speech detection

A well-designed reasoning prompt significantly enhances LLM performance

Prompting strategies are crucial for leveraging LLMs' knowledge in context-aware detection

Abstract

Hate speech has emerged as a major problem plaguing our social spaces today. While there have been significant efforts to address this problem, existing methods are still significantly limited in effectively detecting hate speech online. A major limitation of existing methods is that hate speech detection is a highly contextual problem, and these methods cannot fully capture the context of hate speech to make accurate predictions. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in several natural language tasks. LLMs have undergone extensive training using vast amounts of natural language data, enabling them to grasp intricate contextual details. Hence, they could be used as knowledge bases for context-aware hate speech detection. However, a fundamental problem with using LLMs to detect hate speech is that there are no studies on effectively prompting LLMs for context-aware hate speech detection. In this study, we conduct a large-scale study of hate speech detection, employing five established hate speech datasets. We discover that LLMs not only match but often surpass the performance of current benchmark machine learning models in identifying hate speech. By proposing four diverse prompting strategies that optimize the use of LLMs in detecting hate speech. Our study reveals that a meticulously crafted reasoning prompt can effectively capture the context of hate speech by fully utilizing the knowledge base in LLMs, significantly outperforming existing techniques. Furthermore, although LLMs can provide a rich knowledge base for the contextual detection of hate speech, suitable prompting strategies play a crucial role in effectively leveraging this knowledge base for efficient detection.