ARC-NLP at Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection 2023: Multimodal Methods Boosted by Ensemble Learning, Syntactical and Entity Features

Text-embedded images can serve as a means of spreading hate speech, propaganda, and extremist beliefs. Throughout the Russia-Ukraine war, both opposing factions heavily relied on text-embedded images as a vehicle for spreading propaganda and hate speech. Ensuring the effective detection of hate speech and propaganda is of utmost importance to mitigate the negative effect of hate speech dissemination. In this paper, we outline our methodologies for two subtasks of Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection 2023. For the first subtask, hate speech detection, we utilize multimodal deep learning models boosted by ensemble learning and syntactical text attributes. For the second subtask, target detection, we employ multimodal deep learning models boosted by named entity features. Through experimentation, we demonstrate the superior performance of our models compared to all textual, visual, and text-visual baselines employed in multimodal hate speech detection. Furthermore, our models achieve the first place in both subtasks on the final leaderboard of the shared task.