English

Multilingual Content Moderation: A Case Study on Reddit

Computation and Language 2023-02-21 v1

Abstract

Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content. While prior works have focused on identifying hateful/offensive language, they are not adequate for meeting the challenges of content moderation since 1) moderation decisions are based on violation of rules, which subsumes detection of offensive speech, and 2) such rules often differ across communities which entails an adaptive solution. We propose to study the challenges of content moderation by introducing a multilingual dataset of 1.8 Million Reddit comments spanning 56 subreddits in English, German, Spanish and French. We perform extensive experimental analysis to highlight the underlying challenges and suggest related research problems such as cross-lingual transfer, learning under label noise (human biases), transfer of moderation models, and predicting the violated rule. Our dataset and analysis can help better prepare for the challenges and opportunities of auto moderation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.09618,
  title  = {Multilingual Content Moderation: A Case Study on Reddit},
  author = {Meng Ye and Karan Sikka and Katherine Atwell and Sabit Hassan and Ajay Divakaran and Malihe Alikhani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.09618},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:43:54.117Z