The Vulnerable Identities Recognition Corpus (VIRC) for Hate Speech Analysis

This paper presents the Vulnerable Identities Recognition Corpus (VIRC), a novel resource designed to enhance hate speech analysis in Italian and Spanish news headlines. VIRC comprises 880 headlines, manually annotated for vulnerable identities, dangerous discourse, derogatory expressions, and entities. Our experiments reveal that recent large language models (LLMs) struggle with the fine-grained identification of these elements, underscoring the complexity of detecting hate speech. VIRC stands out as the first resource of its kind in these languages, offering a richer annotation scheme compared to existing corpora. The insights derived from VIRC can inform the development of sophisticated detection tools and the creation of policies and regulations to combat hate speech on social media, promoting a safer online environment. Future work will focus on expanding the corpus and refining annotation guidelines to further enhance its comprehensiveness and reliability.