AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language
  Datasets for African Languages
Authors: name: Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad; name: Idris Abdulmumin; name: Abinew Ali Ayele; name: David Ifeoluwa Adelani; name: Ibrahim Said Ahmad; name: Saminu Mohammad Aliyu; name: Nelson Odhiambo Onyango; name: Lilian D. A. Wanzare; name: Samuel Rutunda; name: Lukman Jibril Aliyu; name: Esubalew Alemneh; name: Oumaima Hourrane; name: Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael; name: Elyas Abdi Ismail; name: Meriem Beloucif; name: Ebrahim Chekol Jibril; name: Andiswa Bukula; name: Rooweither Mabuya; name: Salomey Osei; name: Abigail Oppong; name: Tadesse Destaw Belay; name: Tadesse Kebede Guge; name: Tesfa Tegegne Asfaw; name: Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke; name: Paul Röttger; name: Seid Muhie Yimam; name: Nedjma Ousidhoum
Published: 2025-01-14 18:00:07

Abstract: Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need
socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and
moderated. However, in many regions of the Global South, there have been
several documented occurrences of (1) absence of moderation and (2) censorship
due to the reliance on keyword spotting out of context. Further, high-profile
individuals have frequently been at the center of the moderation process, while
large and targeted hate speech campaigns against minorities have been
overlooked. These limitations are mainly due to the lack of high-quality data
in the local languages and the failure to include local communities in the
collection, annotation, and moderation processes. To address this issue, we
present AfriHate: a multilingual collection of hate speech and abusive language
datasets in 15 African languages. Each instance in AfriHate is annotated by
native speakers familiar with the local culture. We report the challenges
related to the construction of the datasets and present various classification
baseline results with and without using LLMs. The datasets, individual
annotations, and hate speech and offensive language lexicons are available on
https://github.com/AfriHate/AfriHate