SolomonAyuba/nigeria-multilingual-hate-speech-detection

A research on Multilingual Abusive Language Detection (English-Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo) In Nigerian Social Media Using NLP; in fulfilment of Bachelors in Data Science at Miva Open University. # Multilingual Hate Speech Detection in Nigerian Social Media **A benchmarking study across Nigerian Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo using the AfriHate Corpus** --- ## Overview This project is the implementation component of my final year dissertation at Miva Open University, Abuja (DTS 497). It conducts the first Nigeria-focused benchmarking analysis of automated hate speech detection across the four major Nigerian indigenous languages present in the AfriHate corpus (Muhammad et al., 2025). Two classification models are evaluated under identical experimental conditions for each language: - **TF-IDF + Logistic Regression**: a surface-level lexical baseline - **Fine-tuned AfriBERTa**: a transformer pre-trained on 11 African languages The study addresses a gap left by the AfriHate paper itself: no prior work had conducted a Nigeria-specific comparative analysis of these four language subsets, and no TF-IDF baseline had been reported for them. --- ## Languages Covered | Language | Code | Subset Size | Hate Class | IAA (kappa) | |---|---|---|---|---| | Nigerian Pidgin | pcm | 10,599 | 11.1% | 0.65 | | Hausa | hau | 6,644 | 5.2% | 0.75 | | Igbo | ibo | 5,003 | 5.0% | 0.80 | | Yoruba | yor | 4,879 | 3.1% | 0.68 | --- ## Key Results | Language | TF-IDF LR (F1-Macro) | AfriBERTa (F1-Macro) | |---|---|---| | Hausa | 0.785 | **0.888** | | Igbo | **0.956** | 0.949 | | Nigerian Pidgin | **0.741** | 0.739 | | Yoruba | **0.510** | 0.465 | | Average | 0.748 | 0.760 | **Main finding:** AfriBERTa's contextual pre-training provides meaningful gains only for Hausa (+0.103 F1-Macro). For the other three languages, the surface-level TF-IDF baseline performs comparably or better. Yoruba shows complete Hate-class detection failure across both models due to severe class imbalance (30 Hate test instances). --- ## Project Structure ``` nigeria-multilingual-hate-speech-detection/ │ ├── DTS497_Project_Implementation.ipynb # Main Colab notebook (17 cells) ├── README.md …