An Explainable System for Offensive Content Detection in Nastaliq Urdu: Corpus Curation, Transformer Benchmarking, and Word-Level Attribution

Muhammad Shahid Iqbal Malik

Automated moderation systems are deployed at scale, yet they remain opaque to the users and moderators affected by their decisions, and their coverage is almost entirely confined to English. For Urdu written in the Nastaliq script, no such system exists, and the annotated resources it would be built on are drawn largely from Twitter/X, where character limits constrain how users write. Interpretability has received little attention, leaving it unclear what such models actually learn. This study addresses these gaps in three steps. First, we curate and publicly release a corpus of 7604 Nastaliq Urdu Facebook comments, extending an earlier corpus by correcting text-level inconsistencies and re-examining the original labels. Second, we fine-tune four Urdu-capable transformers under a common grid-search protocol and compare them against twelve feature-classifier baselines on identical data partitions. The best configuration, Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL), reaches 87.05% accuracy and 87.06% macro F1, improving on the strongest baseline by 5.52 percentage points, a margin that exceeds the 95% confidence interval on test accuracy; the two leading transformers…