From Abusive Language Classification to Sequence Labeling Identification

Abstract:Industrial content moderation must process massive message streams under tight latency constraints, yet most abusive language (AL) detection systems rely on sentence-level classification (ALC), which neither localizes abusive spans nor identifies who is targeted. We define Abusive Language Identification (ALI) as a sequence-labeling task that jointly extracts AL spans and target mentions, and assess whether this approach can be used for text moderation. On a pilot corpus drawn from a production moderation pipeline, we compare ALI with ALC on cross-domain generalization and implicit abuse, and we also evaluate AL and target span detection. ALI remains competitive with ALC while providing localized outputs for moderators, with a modest and configuration-sensitive advantage on implicit abuse. Exact AL boundaries and target spans remain difficult to recover. We complement this comparison with a qualitative analysis and discuss perspectives on complete target--span linking and on structured benchmarks for ALI.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.06287 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.06287v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.06287 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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