ACL 2025long0 citations
Culture Matters in Toxic Language Detection in Persian
Zahra Bokaei, Walid Magdy, Bonnie Webber
Abstract
Toxic language detection is crucial for creating safer online environments and limiting the spread of harmful content. While toxic language detection has been under-explored in Persian, the current work compares different methods for this task, including fine-tuning, data enrichment, zero-shot and few-shot learning, and cross-lingual transfer learning. What is especially compelling is the impact of cultural context on transfer learning for this task: We show that the language of a country with cultural similarities to Persian yields better results in transfer learning. Conversely, the improvement is lower when the language comes from a culturally distinct country.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{bokaei-etal-2025-culture,
title = "Culture Matters in Toxic Language Detection in {P}ersian",
author = "Bokaei, Zahra and
Magdy, Walid and
Webber, Bonnie",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.456/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.456",
pages = "9290--9304",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}