cs.CLMar 13, 2026

HMS-BERT: Hybrid Multi-Task Self-Training for Multilingual and Multi-Label Cyberbullying Detection

Authors: Zixin Feng, Xinying Cui, Yifan Sun, Zheng Wei, Jiachen Yuan, Jiazhen Hu, Ning Xin, Md Maruf Hasan

Organizations: School of AI and Advanced Computing, XJTLU Entrepreneur College (Taicang), Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou 215123, China

Abstract

Cyberbullying on social media is inherently multilingual and multi-faceted, where abusive behaviors often overlap across multiple categories. Existing methods are commonly limited by monolingual assumptions or single-task formulations, which restrict their effectiveness in realistic multilingual and multi-label scenarios. In this paper, we propose HMS-BERT, a hybrid multi-task self-training framework for multilingual and multi-label cyberbullying detection. Built upon a pretrained multilingual BERT backbone, HMS-BERT integrates contextual representations with handcrafted linguistic features and jointly optimizes a fine-grained multi-label abuse classification task and a three-class main classification task. To address labeled data scarcity in low-resource languages, an iterative self-training strategy with confidence-based pseudo-labeling is introduced to facilitate cross-lingual knowledge transfer. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that HMS-BERT achieves strong performance, attaining a macro F1-score of up to 0.9847 on the multi-label task and an accuracy of 0.6775 on the main classification task. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of the proposed components.

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