Detection of Offensive and Threatening Online Content in a Low Resource
  Language
Fatima Muhammad Adam Abubakar Yakubu Zandam Isa Inuwa-Dutse
Hausa is a major Chadic language, spoken by over 100 million people in
Africa. However, from a computational linguistic perspective, it is considered
a low-resource language, with limited resources to support Natural Language
Processing (NLP) tasks. Online platforms often facilitate social interactions
that can lead to the use of offensive and threatening language, which can go
undetected due to the lack of detection systems designed for Hausa. This study
aimed to address this issue by (1) conducting two user studies (n=308) to
investigate cyberbullying-related issues, (2) collecting and annotating the
first set of offensive and threatening datasets to support relevant downstream
tasks in Hausa, (3) developing a detection system to flag offensive and
threatening content, and (4) evaluating the detection system and the efficacy
of the Google-based translation engine in detecting offensive and threatening
terms in Hausa. We found that offensive and threatening content is quite
common, particularly when discussing religion and politics. Our detection
system was able to detect more than 70% of offensive and threatening content,
although many of these were mistranslated by Google's translation engine. We
attribute this to the subtle relationship between offensive and threatening
content and idiomatic expressions in the Hausa language. We recommend that
diverse stakeholders participate in understanding local conventions and
demographics in order to develop a more effective detection system. These
insights are essential for implementing targeted moderation strategies to
create a safe and inclusive online environment.