Canada

Most research on hate speech detection has focused on English where a sizeable amount of labeled training data is available. However, to expand hate speech detection into more languages, approaches that require minimal training data are needed. In this paper, we test whether natural language inference (NLI) models which perform well in zero- and few-shot settings can benefit hate speech detection performance in scenarios where only a limited amount of labeled data is available in the target language. Our evaluation on five languages demonstrates large performance improvements of NLI fine-tuning over direct fine-tuning in the target language. However, the effectiveness of previous work that proposed intermediate fine-tuning on English data is hard to match. Only in settings where the English training data does not match the test domain, can our customised NLI-formulation outperform intermediate fine-tuning on English. Based on our extensive experiments, we propose a set of recommendations for hate speech detection in languages where minimal labeled training data is available.

ACL 2023

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Natural Language Inference for Hate Speech Detection in Languages with Limited Labeled Data

hate speech

cross-lingual

multilingual

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

In the past few years, the NLP community has actively worked on detecting LGBT+Phobia in online spaces, using textual data publicly available Most of these are for the English language and its variants since it is the most studied language by the NLP community. Nevertheless, efforts towards creating corpora in other languages are active worldwide. Despite this, the Spanish language is an understudied language regarding digital LGBT+Phobia. The only corpus we found in the literature was for the Peninsular Spanish dialects, which use LGBT+phobic terms different than those in the Mexican dialect. For this reason, we present Homo-MEX, a novel corpus for detecting LGBT+Phobia in Mexican Spanish. In this paper, we describe our data-gathering and annotation process. Also, we present a classification benchmark using various traditional machine learning algorithms and two pre-trained deep learning models to showcase our corpus classification potential.

HOMO-MEX: A Mexican Spanish Annotated Corpus for LGBT+phobia Detection on Twitter

In this work we propose a novel annotation scheme which factors hate speech into five separate discursive categories. To evaluate our scheme, we construct a corpus of over 2.9M Twitter posts containing hateful expressions directed at Jews, and annotate a sample dataset of 1,050 tweets. We present a statistical analysis of the annotated dataset as well as discuss annotation examples, and conclude by discussing promising directions for future work.

Factoring Hate Speech: A New Annotation Framework to Study Hate Speech in Social Media

The definitions of abusive, offensive, toxic and uncivil comments used for annotating corpora for automated content moderation are highly intersected and researchers call for their dis- ambiguation. We summarize the definitions of these terms as they appear in 23 papers across different fields. We compare examples given for uncivil, offensive, and toxic comments, attempting to foster more unified scientific re- sources. Additionally, we stress that the term incivility that frequently appears in social sci- ence literature has hardly been mentioned in the literature we analyzed that focuses on computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Toward Disambiguating the Definitions of Abusive, Offensive, Toxic, and Uncivil Comments

We analyze homotransphobic content on Twitter across seven different languages, highlighting how this pervasive issue manifests in dis- tinct cultural contexts worldwide. By developing a comprehensive taxonomy to classify homotransphobic speech, our study establishes a crucial foundation for building effective models to identify and counter such harmful speech on online platforms.

A Cross-Lingual Study of Homotransphobia on Twitter

The automated detection of harmful language has been of great importance for the online world, especially with the growing importance of social media and, consequently, polarisation. There are many open challenges to high quality detection of harmful text, from dataset creation to generalisable application, thus calling for more systematic studies. In this paper, we explore re-annotation as a means of examining the robustness of already existing labelled datasets, showing that, despite using alternative definitions, the inter-annotator agreement remains very inconsistent, highlighting the intrinsically subjective and variable nature of the task. In addition, we build automatic toxicity detectors using the existing datasets, with their original labels, and we evaluate them on our multi-definition and multi-source datasets. Surprisingly, while other studies show that hate speech detection models perform better on data that are derived from the same distribution as the training set, our analysis demonstrates this is not necessarily true.

Harmful Language Datasets: An Assessment of Robustness

The automatic detection of hate speech online is an active research area in NLP. Most of the studies to date are based on social media datasets that contribute to the creation of hate speech detection models trained on them. However, data creation processes contain their own biases, and models inherently learn from these dataset-specific biases. In this paper, we perform a large-scale cross-dataset comparison where we fine-tune language models on different hate speech detection datasets. This analysis shows how some datasets are more generalizable than others when used as training data. Crucially, our experiments show how combining hate speech detection datasets can contribute to the development of robust hate speech detection models. This robustness holds even when controlling by data size and compared with the best individual datasets. 


Robust Hate Speech Detection: A Cross-Dataset Empirical Comparison

Different ways of linguistically expressing the same real-world event can lead to different perceptions of what happened. Previous work has shown that different descriptions of gender-based violence (GBV) influence the reader's perception of who is to blame for the violence, possibly reinforcing stereotypes which see the victim as partly responsible, too. As a contribution to raise awareness on perspective-based writing, and to facilitate access to alternative perspectives, we introduce the novel task of automatically rewriting GBV descriptions as a means to alter the perceived level of responsibility on the perpetrator. We present a quasi-parallel dataset of sentences with low and high perceived responsibility levels for the perpetrator, and experiment with unsupervised (mBART-based), zero-shot and few-shot (GPT3-based) methods for rewriting sentences. We evaluate our models using a questionnaire study and a suite of automatic metrics.

Responsibility Perspective Transfer for Italian Femicide News

The task of fact-checking deals with assessing the veracity of factual claims based on credible evidence and background knowledge. In particular, scientific fact-checking is the variation of the task concerned with verifying claims rooted in scientific knowledge. This task has received significant attention due to the growing importance of scientific and health discussions on online platforms. Automated scientific fact-checking methods based on NLP can help combat the spread of misinformation, assist researchers in knowledge discovery, and help individuals understand new scientific breakthroughs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of existing research in this emerging field and its related tasks. We provide a task description, discuss the construction process of existing datasets, and analyze proposed models and approaches. Based on our findings, we identify intriguing challenges and outline potential future directions to advance the field.

Scientific Fact-Checking: A Survey of Resources and Approaches

The ability to conduct retrospective analyses of attacks on human rights defenders over time and by location is important for humanitarian organizations to better understand historical or ongoing human rights violations and thus better manage the global impact of such events. We hypothesize that NLP can support such efforts by quickly processing large collections of news articles to detect and summarize the characteristics of attacks on human rights defenders. To that end, we propose a new dataset for detecting Attacks on Human Rights Defenders (HRDsAttack) consisting of crowdsourced annotations on 500 online news articles. The annotations include fine-grained information about the type and location of the attacks, as well as information about the victim(s). We demonstrate the usefulness of the dataset by using it to train and evaluate baseline models on several sub-tasks to predict the annotated characteristics.

A New Task and Dataset on Detecting Attacks on Human Rights Defenders

With the growing importance of detecting misinformation, many studies have focused on verifying factual claims by retrieving evidence. However, canonical fact verification tasks do not apply to catching subtle differences in factually consistent claims, which might still bias the readers, especially on contentious political or economic issues. Our underlying assumption is that among the trusted sources, one's argument is not necessarily more true than the other, requiring comparison rather than verification. In this study, we propose ClaimDiff, a novel dataset that primarily focuses on comparing the nuance between claim pairs. In ClaimDiff, we provide 2,941 annotated claim pairs from 268 news articles. We observe that while humans are capable of detecting the nuances between claims, strong baselines struggle to detect them, showing over a 19% absolute gap with the humans. We hope this initial study could help readers to gain an unbiased grasp of contentious issues through machine-aided comparison.

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Evaluating the Effectiveness of Natural Language Inference for Hate Speech Detection in Languages with Limited Labeled Data

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HOMO-MEX: A Mexican Spanish Annotated Corpus for LGBT+phobia Detection on Twitter

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