SLM-Mod: Small Language Models Surpass LLMs at Content Moderation

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in many natural language understanding tasks, including content moderation. However, these models can be expensive to query in real-time and do not allow for a community-specific approach to content moderation. To address these challenges, we explore the use of open-source small language models (SLMs) for community-specific content moderation tasks. We fine-tune and evaluate SLMs (less than 15B parameters) by comparing their performance against much larger open- and closed-sourced models. Using 150K comments from 15 popular Reddit communities, we find that SLMs outperform LLMs at content moderation -- 11.5% higher accuracy and 25.7% higher recall on average across all communities. We further show the promise of cross-community content moderation, which has implications for new communities and the development of cross-platform moderation techniques. Finally, we outline directions for future work on language model based content moderation. Code and links to HuggingFace models can be found at https://github.com/AGoyal0512/SLM-Mod.