AmpleHate: Amplifying the Attention for Versatile Implicit Hate Detection

TL;DR

AmpleHate introduces a novel method that mimics human reasoning by identifying explicit and implicit targets and their relations to improve implicit hate speech detection, achieving state-of-the-art results and enhanced interpretability.

Contribution

It proposes AmpleHate, a new approach that captures target-context relations using attention mechanisms, outperforming existing contrastive learning methods in implicit hate detection.

Findings

Achieves 82.14% improvement over baselines.

Outperforms contrastive learning models.

Produces attention patterns aligned with human judgment.

Abstract

Implicit hate speech detection is challenging due to its subtlety and reliance on contextual interpretation rather than explicit offensive words. Current approaches rely on contrastive learning, which are shown to be effective on distinguishing hate and non-hate sentences. Humans, however, detect implicit hate speech by first identifying specific targets within the text and subsequently interpreting how these target relate to their surrounding context. Motivated by this reasoning process, we propose AmpleHate, a novel approach designed to mirror human inference for implicit hate detection. AmpleHate identifies explicit target using a pretrained Named Entity Recognition model and capture implicit target information via [CLS] tokens. It computes attention-based relationships between explicit, implicit targets and sentence context and then, directly injects these relational vectors into the final sentence representation. This amplifies the critical signals of target-context relations for determining implicit hate. Experiments demonstrate that AmpleHate achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming contrastive learning baselines by an average of 82.14% and achieve faster convergence. Qualitative analyses further reveal that attention patterns produced by AmpleHate closely align with human judgement, underscoring its interpretability and robustness. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/leeyejin1231/AmpleHate.