Hate Speech Classification In Roman Urdu: A Comparative Study On Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning And Prompt Engineering

Due to the widespread accessibility of the internet and social media, toxic and hateful con-tent has grown exponentially, causing significant distress and negative societal impacts. Ro-man Urdu, a low-resource language used in Pakistan and among Urdu-speaking communities worldwide, presents additional challenges because of its informal grammar, inconsistent sen-tence structures, and multiple variations in word spellings. This research aims to identify the most effective techniques for hate speech classification in such low-resource settings with limited data. To address this, the study investigates and compares the latest approaches, in-cluding prompt tuning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) using LoRA, and prompt en-gineering, under various experimental configurations. To achieve this objective, four exper-iments were designed. The first experiment involved direct inferencing with LLMs without any fine-tuning, to evaluate how well these models understand Roman Urdu in a zero-shot setting, especially given limited data. The second experiment utilized parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) with LoRA, which updates only a small subset of parameters, thereby reducing computational cost. The third experiment explored prompt tuning with both mixed and manually crafted prompts, using very small sets of training examples relative to the entire dataset, making it computationally efficient as well. Finally, the fourth experiment applied prompt engineering through zero-shot and few-shot learning, relying solely on care-fully designed instruction prompts for classification without further training.