HateCOT: An Explanation-Enhanced Dataset for Generalizable Offensive Speech Detection via Large Language Models

Warning: This paper contains examples of very offensive material. The widespread use of social media necessitates reliable and efficient detection of offensive content to mitigate harmful effects. Although sophisticated models perform well on individual datasets, they often fail to generalize due to varying definitions and labeling of "offensive content." In this paper, we introduce HateCOT, an English dataset with over 52,000 samples from diverse sources, featuring explanations generated by GPT-3.5-Turbo and curated by humans. We demonstrate that pretraining on HateCOT significantly enhances the performance of open-source Large Language Models on three benchmark datasets for offensive content detection in both zero-shot and fewshot settings, despite differences in domain and task. Additionally, HateCOT facilitates effective K-shot fine-tuning of LLMs with limited data and improves the quality of their explanations, as confirmed by our human evaluation. Our repository is available at https: //github.com/hnghiem-usc/hatecot .