  Detecting and classifying instances of hate in social media text has been a
problem of interest in Natural Language Processing in the recent years. Our
work leverages state of the art Transformer language models to identify hate
speech in a multilingual setting. Capturing the intent of a post or a comment
on social media involves careful evaluation of the language style, semantic
content and additional pointers such as hashtags and emojis. In this paper, we
look at the problem of identifying whether a Twitter post is hateful and
offensive or not. We further discriminate the detected toxic content into one
of the following three classes: (a) Hate Speech (HATE), (b) Offensive (OFFN)
and (c) Profane (PRFN). With a pre-trained multilingual Transformer-based text
encoder at the base, we are able to successfully identify and classify hate
speech from multiple languages. On the provided testing corpora, we achieve
Macro F1 scores of 90.29, 81.87 and 75.40 for English, German and Hindi
respectively while performing hate speech detection and of 60.70, 53.28 and
49.74 during fine-grained classification. In our experiments, we show the
efficacy of Perspective API features for hate speech classification and the
effects of exploiting a multilingual training scheme. A feature selection study
is provided to illustrate impacts of specific features upon the architecture's
classification head.
