Unveiling the Capabilities of Large Language Models in Detecting Offensive Language with Annotation Disagreement

LLMs are widely used for offensive language detection due to their advanced capability. However, the challenges posed by human annotation disagreement in real-world datasets remain underexplored. These disagreement samples are difficult to detect due to their ambiguous nature. Additionally, the confidence of LLMs in processing disagreement samples can provide valuable insights into their alignment with human annotators. To address this gap, we systematically evaluate the ability of LLMs to detect offensive language with annotation disagreement. We compare the binary accuracy of multiple LLMs across varying annotation agreement levels and analyze the relationship between LLM confidence and annotation agreement. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of disagreement samples on LLM decision-making during few-shot learning and instruction fine-tuning. Our findings highlight the challenges posed by disagreement samples and offer guidance for improving LLM-based offensive language detection.