Uncovering Political Hate Speech During Indian Election Campaign: A New Low-Resource Dataset and Baselines

The detection of hate speech in political discourse is a critical issue, and this becomes even more challenging in low-resource languages. To address this issue, we introduce a new dataset named IEHate, which contains 11,457 manually annotated Hindi tweets related to the Indian Assembly Election Campaign from November 1, 2021, to March 9, 2022. We performed a detailed analysis of the dataset, focusing on the prevalence of hate speech in political communication and the different forms of hateful language used. Additionally, we benchmark the dataset using a range of machine learning, deep learning, and transformer-based algorithms. Our experiments reveal that the performance of these models can be further improved, highlighting the need for more advanced techniques for hate speech detection in low-resource languages. In particular, the relatively higher score of human evaluation over algorithms emphasizes the importance of utilizing both human and automated approaches for effective hate speech moderation. Our IEHate dataset can serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working on developing and evaluating hate speech detection techniques in low-resource languages. Overall, our work underscores the importance of addressing the challenges of identifying and mitigating hate speech in political discourse, particularly in the context of low-resource languages. The dataset and resources for this work are made available at https://github.com/Farhan-jafri/Indian-Election.