United Arab Emirates

Detecting &quot;toxic&quot; language in internet content is a pressing social and technical challenge. In this work, we focus on Perspective API from Jigsaw, a state-of-the-art tool that promises to score the &quot;toxicity&#39;&#39; of text, with a recent model update that claims impressive results (Lees et al., 2022). We seek to challenge certain normative claims about toxic language by proposing a new benchmark, Selected Adversarial SemanticS, or SASS. We evaluate Perspective on SASS, and compare to low-effort alternatives, like zero-shot and few-shot GPT-3 prompt models, in binary classification settings. We find that Perspective exhibits troubling shortcomings across a number of our toxicity categories. SASS provides a new tool for evaluating performance on previously undetected toxic language that avoids common normative pitfalls. Our work leads us to emphasize the importance of questioning assumptions made by tools already in deployment for toxicity detection in order to anticipate and prevent disparate harms.

EMNLP 2022

Critical Perspectives: A Benchmark Revealing Pitfalls in PerspectiveAPI

abusive language / content moderation / toxic language

social media

bias

Detecting "toxic" language in internet content is a pressing social and technical challenge. In this work, we focus on Perspective API from Jigsaw, a state-of-the-art tool that promises to score the "toxicity'' of text, with a recent model update that claims impressive results (Lees et al., 2022). We seek to challenge certain normative claims about toxic language by proposing a new benchmark, Selected Adversarial SemanticS, or SASS. We evaluate Perspective on SASS, and compare to low-effort alternatives, like zero-shot and few-shot GPT-3 prompt models, in binary classification settings. We find that Perspective exhibits troubling shortcomings across a number of our toxicity categories. SASS provides a new tool for evaluating performance on previously undetected toxic language that avoids common normative pitfalls. Our work leads us to emphasize the importance of questioning assumptions made by tools already in deployment for toxicity detection in order to anticipate and prevent disparate harms.

workshop paper

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Speech production is nuanced and unique to every individual, but today's Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDSs) are trained to use general speech patterns to successfully improve performance on various evaluation metrics. However, these patterns do not apply to certain user groups - often the very people that can benefit the most from SDSs. For example, people with dementia produce more disfluent speech than the general population. In order to evaluate systems with specific user groups in mind, and to guide the design of such systems to deliver maximum benefit to these users, data must be collected securely. In this short paper we present CVR-SI, a bespoke tool for ethical data collection. Designed for the healthcare domain, we argue that it should also be used in more general settings. We detail how off-the-shelf solutions fail to ensure that sensitive data remains secure and private. We then describe the ethical design and security features of our device, with a full guide on how to build both the hardware and software components of CVR-SI. Our design ensures inclusivity to all researchers in this field, particularly those who are not hardware experts. This guarantees everyone can collect appropriate data for human evaluation ethically, securely, and in a timely manner.

Securely Capturing People's Interactions with Voice Assistants at Home: A Bespoke Tool for Ethical Data Collection

While much attention has been paid to identifying explicit hate speech, implicit hateful expressions that are disguised in coded or indirect language are pervasive and remain a major challenge for existing hate speech detection systems. This paper presents the first attempt to apply Entity Linking (EL) techniques to both explicit and implicit hate speech detection, where we show that such real world knowledge about entity mentions in a text does help models better detect hate speech, and the benefit of adding it into the model is more pronounced when explicit entity triggers (e.g., rally, KKK) are present. We also discuss cases where real world knowledge does not add value to hate speech detection, which provides more insights into understanding and modeling the subtleties of hate speech.

Leveraging World Knowledge in Implicit Hate Speech Detection

Sustainable development requires a significant change in our dietary habits. Argument mining can help achieve this goal by both affecting and helping understand people's behavior. We design an annotation scheme for argument mining from online discourse around sustainable diets, including novel evidence types specific to this domain. Using Twitter as a source, we crowdsource a dataset of 597 tweets annotated in relation to 5 topics. We benchmark a variety of NLP models on this dataset, demonstrating strong performance in some sub-tasks, while highlighting remaining challenges.

A Dataset of Sustainable Diet Arguments on Twitter

Socioeconomic status (SES) is a metric used to compare a person's social standing based on their income, level of education, and occupation. Students from low SES backgrounds are those whose parents have low income and have limited access to the resources and opportunities they need to aid their success. Researchers have studied many issues and solutions for students with low SES, and there is a lot of research going on in many fields, especially in the social sciences. Computer science, however, has not yet as a field turned its considerable potential to addressing these inequalities. Utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and technology, our work aims to address these disparities and ways to bridge the gap. We built a simple string matching algorithm including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model and Open Information Extraction (open IE) to generate relational triples that are connected to the context of the students' challenges, and the strategies they follow to overcome them. We manually collected 16 narratives about the experiences of low SES students in higher education from a publicly accessible internet forum (Reddit) and tested our model on them. We demonstrate that our strategy is effective (from 37.50\% to 80\%) in gathering contextual data about low SES students, in particular, about their difficulties while in a higher educational institution and how they improve their situation. A detailed error analysis suggests that increase of data, improvement of the LDA model, and quality of triples can help get better results from our model. For the advantage of other researchers, we make our code available.

Impacts of Low Socio-economic Status on Educational Outcomes: A Narrative Based Analysis

Essentialist beliefs (i.e., believing that members of the same group are fundamentally alike) play a central role in social stereotypes and can lead to harm when left unchallenged. In our work, we conduct exploratory studies into the task of countering essentialist beliefs (e.g., "liberals are stupid"). Drawing on prior work from psychology and NLP, we construct five types of counterstatements and conduct human studies on the effectiveness of these different strategies. Our studies also investigate the role in choosing a counterstatement of the level of explicitness with which an essentialist belief is conveyed. We find that statements that broaden the scope of a stereotype (e.g., to other groups, as in "conservatives can also be stupid") are the most popular countering strategy. We conclude with a discussion of challenges and open questions for future work in this area (e.g., improving factuality, studying community-specific variation) and we emphasize the importance of work at the intersection of NLP and psychology.

Towards Countering Essentialism through Social Bias Reasoning

The topic of Climate Change (CC) has received limited attention in NLP despite its real-world urgency. Activists and policy-makers need NLP tools in order to effectively process the vast and rapidly growing textual data produced on CC. Their utility, however, primarily depends on whether state-of-the-art models can generalize across various tasks in the CC domain. In order to address this gap, we introduce the Climate Change Benchmark (ClimaBench), a benchmark collection of existing disparate datasets for evaluating model performance across a diverse set of CC NLU tasks systematically. Further, we enhance the benchmark by releasing two large-scale labelled text classification and question-answering datasets curated from publicly available environmental disclosures. Lastly, we provide an analysis of several generic and CC-oriented models answering whether fine-tuning on domain text offers any improvements across these tasks. We hope this work provides a standard assessment tool for research on CC text data.

ClimaBench: A Benchmark Dataset For Climate Change Text Understanding in English

Social media has become an important information source for crisis management and provides quick access to ongoing developments and critical information. However, classification models suffer from event-related biases and highly imbalanced label distributions which still poses a challenging task. To address these challenges, we propose a combination of entity-masked language modeling and hierarchical multi-label classification as a multi-task learning problem. We evaluate our method on tweets from the TREC-IS dataset and show an absolute performance gain w.r.t. F1-score of up to 10\% for actionable information types. Moreover, we found that entity-masking reduces the effect of overfitting to in-domain events and enables improvements in cross-event generalization.

Enhancing Crisis-Related Tweet Classification with Entity-Masked Language Modeling and Multi-Task Learning

Creating classifiers of disinformation is time-consuming, expensive, and requires vast effort from experts spanning different fields. Even when these efforts succeed, their roll-out to publicly available applications stagnates. While these models struggle to find their consumer-accessible use, disinformation behavior online evolves at a pressing speed. The hoaxes get shared in various abbreviations on social networks, often in user-restricted areas, making external monitoring and intervention virtually impossible. To re-purpose existing NLP methods for the new paradigm of sharing misinformation, we propose leveraging information about given texts' originating news sources to proxy the respective text's trustworthiness. We first present a methodology for determining the sources' overall credibility. We demonstrate our pipeline construction in a specific language and introduce CNSC: a novel dataset for Czech articles' news source and source credibility classification. We constitute initial benchmarks on multiple architectures. Lastly, we create in-the-wild wrapper applications of the trained models: a chatbot, a browser extension, and a standalone web application.

Misinformation Detection in the Wild: News Source Classification as a Proxy for Non-article Texts

It is important to understand how people use words to persuade each other. This helps understand debate, and detect persuasive narratives in regard to e.g. misinformation. While computational modelling of some aspects of persuasion has received some attention, a way to unify and describe the overall phenomenon of when persuasion becomes undesired and problematic, is missing. In this paper, we attempt to address this by proposing a taxonomy of computational persuasion. Drawing upon existing research and resources, this paper shows how to re-frame and re-organise current work into a coherent framework targeting the misuse of rhetorical appeals. As a study to validate these re-framings, we then train and evaluate models of persuasion adapted to our taxonomy. Our results show an application of our taxonomy, and we are able to detecting misuse of rhetorical appeals, finding that these are more often used in misinformative contexts than in true ones.

Modelling Persuasion through Misuse of Rhetorical Appeals

With the identification of the inequality encoded in information acquisition among social classes, we propose to leverage a powerful concept that has never been studied as a linguistic construct, "fun", to deconstruct the inequality. Inspired by theories in sociology, we draw connection between social class and information cocoon, through the lens of fun, and hypothesize the measurement of "how fun one's dominating social cocoon is" to be an indicator of the social class of an individual. Following this, we propose an NLP framework to combat the issue by measuring how fun one's information cocoon is, and empower individuals to emancipate from their trapped cocoons. We position our work to be a domain-agnostic framework that can be deployed in a lot of downstream cases, and is one that aims to deconstruct, as opposed to reinforcing, the traditional social structure of beneficiaries.

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