Few-Shot Contrastive Adaptation for Audio Abuse Detection in Low-Resource Indic Languages

Abusive and hateful speech is increasingly spoken rather than written, surfacing in voice notes, calls, and short-form videos. Most detection systems still transcribe speech to text before classifying it, but transcription is unreliable for languages lacking strong speech recognisers, and it discards the tone and emotion that often carry the abuse itself. This paper examines whether abusive speech can instead be detected directly from audio, using CLAP, a model that learns a shared representation of sound and language, evaluated across ten Indic languages in the ADIMA dataset. A lightweight classifier trained on CLAP's existing audio representations, without adapting the model itself, comes within one to three points of a fully supervised system, and far outperforms prompting with no labelled examples at all. Further adaptation with a handful of labelled examples per language yields little extra benefit, varying unpredictably across languages. CLAP-based audio representations thus already offer a strong, inexpensive foundation for detecting abusive speech across languages, lowering the labelled data needed in practice.