MHS-STMA: Multimodal Hate Speech Detection via Scalable Transformer-Based Multilevel Attention Framework

Abstract

Social media has a significant impact on people's lives. Hate speech on social media has emerged as one of society's most serious issues in recent years. Text and pictures are two forms of multimodal data that are distributed within articles. Unimodal analysis has been the primary emphasis of earlier approaches. Additionally, when doing multimodal analysis, researchers neglect to preserve the distinctive qualities associated with each modality. To address these shortcomings, the present article suggests a scalable architecture for multimodal hate content detection called transformer-based multilevel attention (STMA). This architecture consists of three main parts: a combined attention-based deep learning mechanism, a vision attention-mechanism encoder, and a caption attention-mechanism encoder. To identify hate content, each component uses various attention processes and handles multimodal data in a unique way. Several studies employing multiple assessment criteria on three hate speech datasets such as Hateful memes, MultiOff, and MMHS150K, validate the suggested architecture's efficacy. The outcomes demonstrate that on all three datasets, the suggested strategy performs better than the baseline approaches.