AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages
Abstract
Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. However, in many regions of the Global South, there have been several documented occurrences of (1) absence of moderation and (2) censorship due to the reliance on keyword spotting out of context. Further, high-profile individuals have frequently been at the center of the moderation process, while large and targeted hate speech campaigns against minorities have been overlooked. These limitations are mainly due to the lack of high-quality data in the local languages and the failure to include local communities in the collection, annotation, and moderation processes. To address this issue, we present AfriHate: a multilingual collection of hate speech and abusive language datasets in 15 African languages. Each instance in AfriHate is annotated by native speakers familiar with the local culture. We report the challenges related to the construction of the datasets and present various classification baseline results with and without using LLMs. The datasets, individual annotations, and hate speech and offensive language lexicons are available on https://github.com/AfriHate/AfriHate
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2501.08284,
title = {AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages},
author = {Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad and Idris Abdulmumin and Abinew Ali Ayele and David Ifeoluwa Adelani and Ibrahim Said Ahmad and Saminu Mohammad Aliyu and Nelson Odhiambo Onyango and Lilian D. A. Wanzare and Samuel Rutunda and Lukman Jibril Aliyu and Esubalew Alemneh and Oumaima Hourrane and Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael and Elyas Abdi Ismail and Meriem Beloucif and Ebrahim Chekol Jibril and Andiswa Bukula and Rooweither Mabuya and Salomey Osei and Abigail Oppong and Tadesse Destaw Belay and Tadesse Kebede Guge and Tesfa Tegegne Asfaw and Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke and Paul Röttger and Seid Muhie Yimam and Nedjma Ousidhoum},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.08284},
year = {2025}
}