CST: Lightweight Risk Triage with Source-Grounded Evidence for Web Discussions

Abstract

Web communities rely on moderators to catch harmful messages such as insults, hate speech, and scams, but no one can read every message. Existing tools give each message a risk score, which tells moderators where to look but not what to read or how to check it. Yet meaning depends on context: the same reply, "I agree.", can support or oppose removing someone from a group. Moderators therefore need source-grounded evidence, not just scores: a few key messages kept with their original wording and replies. We present CST, a lightweight triage pipeline that first decides where to look, then what to show. It scores risk by pairing character patterns, which capture exact wording, with sentence meaning from a fixed multilingual model, so it handles several languages and runs on an ordinary CPU. It then groups related messages and picks from each group in turn, so a small reading budget covers different parts of a discussion, and links every pick back to the original thread. Across six tasks from five datasets in several languages, CST ranks harmful messages more accurately than a fully fine-tuned multilingual model and, under the same budget, finds more of them than reading by score alone. In a user study, reviewers needed at least 27% less time with CST's grouped evidence while keeping decision accuracy above 94%. CST turns risk scores into evidence that moderators can read quickly and check in context. Code and dataset reconstruction resources will be released at https://github.com/Kirito14IT/CST-MIL.