In this paper, we propose, for the first time, a topic-oriented approach to study generalization across popular hate speech datasets. We first perform a comparative analysis of the performances of Transformer-based models in capturing topic-generic and topic-specific knowledge when trained on different datasets. We then propose a novel, simple yet effective approach to study more precisely which topics are best captured in implicit manifestations of hate, showing that selecting combinations of datasets with better out-of-domain topical coverage improves the reliability of automatic hate speech detection.
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.254/