In this paper we investigate the explainability of transformer models and their plausibility for hate speech and counter speech detection. We compare representatives of four different explainability approaches, i.e., gradient-based, perturbation-based, attention-based, and prototype-based approaches, and analyze them quantitatively with an ablation study and qualitatively in a user study. Results show that perturbation-based explainability performs best, followed by gradient-based and attention-based explainability. Prototypebased experiments did not yield useful results. Overall, we observe that explainability strongly supports the users in better understanding the model predictions.
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