RAGing Against Misogyny: Improving Implicit Misogyny Explanations

Ivana Crescenzi, Arianna Muti, Maarten Sap, Tommaso Caselli, Debora Nozza

Implicit misogyny often requires background knowledge to be understood. To address this challenge, we propose a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework for detecting and explaining implicit misogyny in English and Italian, leveraging encyclopedic, slang and feminist knowledge sources. Using the ImplicIT-Mis and SBIC+ datasets, we evaluate the contribution of each knowledge source to detection and explanation quality, investigating also whether RAG addresses known LLM failure modes in implicit misogyny. Results show that RAG improves recall on ImplicIT-Mis, but does not improve detection performance on SBIC+. However, human evaluation shows that RAG-based explanations are preferred over no-RAG explanations in both languages. Feminist literature emerges as the most consistently useful source for detection and explanation.