Afro-XLM-R-offensive-detection-v1

Afro-XLM-R Fine-Tuned for Setswana Offensive Language Detection

1. Model Summary

This repository contains a fine-tuned version of Afro-XLM-R, a multilingual transformer model optimised for African languages.
The model has been fine-tuned to classify Setswana text into:

• 0 – Non-offensive
• 1 – Offensive

Afro-XLM-R provides a multilingual baseline to benchmark performance against monolingual Setswana models such as PuoBERTa.
Its cross-lingual capabilities make it particularly useful when dealing with:

• Code-switching
• Multilingual social media content
• Borrowed words from English/Setswana

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2. Intended Use

Primary Use Cases

• Detection of offensive, abusive, or harmful expressions in Setswana text.
• Digital forensic analysis of Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social media content.
• Research in low-resource NLP for African languages.
• Benchmarking multilingual vs monolingual transformer performance.

Not Intended For

• Fully automated decision systems without human oversight.
• Legal conclusions or disciplinary outcomes without expert forensic interpretation.
• Non-Setswana text unless validated.

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3. Dataset Description

A curated dataset of 977 Setswana social media text samples was used.

Class Distribution

• Offensive: 477
• Non-offensive: 500

Annotation Notes

• Offensive content includes insults, cyberbullying, hate speech, threats, and abusive slang.
• Semantic triggers were used during training for improved sensitivity to Setswana insult constructions.
• The test split is tag-free to reflect real-world forensic environments.

Ethical Handling

• All posts were sourced from publicly available content.
• Identifiable information was removed.
• This dataset is not automatically redistributed as part of the model.

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4. Training Procedure

Model Architecture

• Base model: Afro-XLM-R
• Backbone: XLM-RoBERTa
• Multilingual African-centric pretraining dataset
• ~270M parameters (depending on variant)

Training Hyperparameters

• Epochs: 10
• Batch size: 16 (training), 64 (evaluation)
• Optimizer: AdamW
• Learning rate: 1e-5
• Weight decay: 0.01
• Loss function: class-weighted cross entropy
  • Weights = [1.0, 2.0] (non-offensive, offensive)

Hardware

• Trained using Google Colab GPU (T4/A100 depending on session).

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5. Evaluation Methodology

The dataset split follows:

• 80% training
• 20% held-out test set
• 5-fold stratified cross-validation used during model selection.
• No semantic triggers or augmentations present in the test set.

Evaluation uses the following metrics:

• Accuracy
• Macro F1
• Recall for offensive class
• Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC)
• ROC-AUC
• Runtime speed

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6. Test Set Results (Final Model)

Interpretation

• The ROC-AUC of 0.90 demonstrates strong separation between offensive and non-offensive classes.
• MCC = 0.7229 indicates strong classification reliability in mildly imbalanced data.
• Recall(1) = 0.8111 means the model captures most harmful/offensive cases — useful for forensic workflows where false negatives are costly.
• Slightly slower inference compared to PuoBERTa due to model size and multilingual embedding space.

Overall, Afro-XLM-R performs strongly as a multilingual baseline for Setswana offensive-language detection.

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7. How to Use the Model

Python Inference Example

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForSequenceClassification
import torch

model_name = "mopatik/Afro-XLM-R-offensive-detection-v1"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(model_name)

# Ensure model is in evaluation mode
model.eval()

# Sample text (replace with your actual text)
#sample_text = "o seso tota"  # (you are insanely stupid) Example Setswana text
sample_text = "modimo a le segofatse"  # (God bless you all) Example Setswana text

# Tokenize and prepare input
inputs = tokenizer(
    sample_text,
    padding='max_length',
    truncation=True,
    max_length=128,
    return_tensors="pt"
)

# Make prediction
with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)
    probs = torch.softmax(outputs.logits, dim=1)
    predicted_class = torch.argmax(probs).item()

# Get class label and confidence
class_names = ["Non-offensive", "Offensive"]
confidence = probs[0][predicted_class].item()

print(f"Text: {sample_text}")
print(f"Predicted class: {class_names[predicted_class]} (confidence: {confidence:.2%})")
print(f"Class probabilities: {dict(zip(class_names, [f'{p:.2%}' for p in probs[0].tolist()]))}")