Detecting Offensive Language on Malay Social Media: A Zero-Shot, Cross-Language Transfer Approach Using Dual-Branch mBERT

Abstract

Social media serves as a platform for netizens to stay informed and express their opinions through the Internet. Currently, the social media discourse environment faces a significant security threat—offensive comments. A group of users posts comments that are provocative, discriminatory, and objectionable, intending to disrupt online discussions, provoke others, and incite intergroup conflict. These comments undermine citizens’ legitimate rights, disrupt social order, and may even lead to real-world violent incidents. However, current automatic detection of offensive language primarily focuses on a few high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages, such as Malay, with insufficient annotated corpora for effective detection. To address this, we propose a zero-shot, cross-language unsupervised offensive language detection (OLD) method using a dual-branch mBERT transfer approach. Firstly, using the multi-language BERT (mBERT) model as the foundational language model, the first network branch automatically extracts features from both source and target domain data. Subsequently, Sinkhorn distance is employed to measure the discrepancy between the source and target language feature representations. By estimating the Sinkhorn distance between the labeled source language (e.g., English) and the unlabeled target language (e.g., Malay) feature representations, the method minimizes the Sinkhorn distance adversarially to provide more stable gradients, thereby extracting effective domain-shared features. Finally, offensive pivot words from the source and target language training sets are identified. These pivot words are then removed from the training data in a second network branch, which employs the same architecture. This process constructs an auxiliary OLD task. By concealing offensive pivot words in the training data, the model reduces overfitting and enhances robustness to the target language. In the end-to-end framework training, the combination of cross-lingual shared features and independent features culminates in unsupervised detection of offensive speech in the target language. The experimental results demonstrate that employing cross-language model transfer learning can achieve unsupervised detection of offensive content in low-resource languages. The number of labeled samples in the source language is positively correlated with transfer performance, and a greater similarity between the source and target languages leads to better transfer effects. The proposed method achieves the best performance in OLD on the Malay dataset, achieving an F1 score of 80.7%. It accurately identifies features of offensive speech, such as sarcasm, mockery, and implicit expressions, and showcases strong generalization and excellent stability across different target languages.