VRLLab at HSD-2Lang 2024: Turkish hate speech detection online with TurkishBERTweet

Social media platforms like Twitter - recently rebranded as X - produce nearly half a billion tweets daily and host a significant number of users that can be affected by content that is not properly moderated. In this work, we present an approach that ranked third at the HSD-2Lang 2024 competition's subtask-A, along with additional methodology developed for this task and evaluation of different approaches. We utilize three different models, and the best-performing approach uses the publicly available TurkishBERTweet model with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) for fine-tuning. We also experiment with another publicly available model and a novel methodology to ensemble different hand-crafted features and outcomes of different models. Finally, we report the experimental results, competition scores, and discussion to improve this effort further.