Enhancing abusive language detection: A domain-adapted approach leveraging BERT pre-training tasks

The widespread adoption of deep learning approaches in natural language processing is largely attributed to their exceptional performance across diverse tasks. Notably, Transformer-based models, such as BERT, have gained popularity for their remarkable efficacy and their ease of adaptation (via fine-tuning) across various domains. Despite their success, fine-tuning these models for informal language, particularly instances involving offensive expressions, presents a major challenge due to limitations in vocabulary coverage and contextual information for such tasks. To address these challenges, we propose the domain adaptation of the BERT language model for the task of detecting abusive language. Our approach involves constraining the language model with the adaptation and paradigm shift of two default pre-trained tasks, the design of two datasets specifically engineered to support the adapted pre-training tasks, and the proposal of a dynamic weighting loss function. The evaluation of these adapted configurations on six datasets dedicated to abusive language detection reveals promising outcomes, with a significant enhancement observed compared to the base model. Furthermore, our proposed methods yield competitive results when compared to state-of-the-art approaches, establishing a robust and easily trainable model for the effective identification of abusive language. © 2024 Elsevier B.V.