Mexico

Images increasingly constitute a larger portion of internet content, encoding even more complex meanings. Recent studies have highlight the pivotal role of visual communication in the spread of extremist content, particularly that associated with right-wing political ideologies. However, the capability of machine learning systems to recognize such meanings, sometimes implicit, remains limited. To enable future research in this area, we introduce and release VIDA, the Visual Incel Data Archive, a multimodal dataset comprising visual material and internet memes collected from two main Incel communities (Italian and Anglophone) known for their extremist misogynistic content. Following the analytical framework of Shifman (2014), we propose a new taxonomy for annotation across three main levels of analysis: content, form, and stance (hate). This allows for the association of images with fine-grained contextual information that help to identify the presence of offensiveness and a broader set of cultural references, enhancing the understanding of more nuanced aspects in visual communication. In this work we present a statistical analysis of the annotated dataset as well as discuss annotation examples and future line of research.

NAACL 2024

VIDA: The Visual Incel Data Archive. A Theory-oriented Annotated Dataset To Enhance Hate Detection Through Visual Culture

hate taxonomy

visual culture

incel

multimodal corpora

meme

workshop paper

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We present the Adversarial Nibbler Challenge, a novel red-teaming methodology for crowdsourcing implicitly adversarial prompts (those that trigger models to generate unsafe images for non-obvious reasons). Using a suite of state-of-the-art text-to-image models, a simple user interface, and outreach to engage diverse populations, we have captured long-tail safety issues that may be overlooked in standard testing. The first challenge round resulted in over 12k prompt-image pairs with machine annotations for safety, with 1.5k samples containing rich human annotations of harm types and attack strategies. Our findings emphasize the need for continual auditing as new vulnerabilities emerge in text-to-image models.

Adversarial Nibbler - A novel crowdsourcing procedure for detecting harmful content in t2i models

Manually annotating harmful content is economically and socially undesirable. While LLMs can be prompted to perform annotation tasks in zero-shot settings, little is known about the extent to which LLMs comply with prompt instructions and how prompt design can impact the quality of output annotations. To fill this gap, we conducted a large-scale experiment to re-annotate toxicity and rumor stance datasets using 3 LLMs and 16 prompts that vary in terms of definitions, output types, explanation, and prompt length. Initial results show that the choice of LLM matters more than prompt design. Within prompts, asking for a numerical score instead of a label can reduce output compliance and accuracy. Concise prompts can reduce annotation costs by up to 40\% but annotations may be less accurate. This work is part of an ongoing project as we plan to estimate how different annotations can impact downstream analyses of harmful content.

Does Prompt Engineering Matter for LLM-based Toxicity and Rumor Stance Detection? Evidence from a Large-scale Experiment

Detecting problematic content, such as hate speech, is a multifaceted and ever-changing task, influenced by social dynamics, user populations, diversity of sources, and evolving language. There has been significant efforts, both in academia and in industry, to develop annotated resources that capture various aspects of problematic content. Due to researchers' diverse objectives, these annotations are often inconsistent and hence, reports of progress on the detection of problematic content are fragmented. This pattern is expected to persist unless we pool these resources, taking into account the dynamic nature of this issue. In this paper, we propose integrating the available resources, leveraging their dynamic nature to break this pattern, and introduce a continual learning framework and benchmark for problematic content detection. Our benchmark, comprising 84 related tasks, creates a novel measure of progress: prioritizing the adaptability of classifiers to evolving tasks over excelling in specific tasks. To ensure continuous relevance, our benchmark is designed for seamless integration of new tasks. Our results demonstrate that continual learning methods outperform static approaches by up to 17% and 4% AUC in capturing the evolving content and adapting to novel forms of problematic content

Towards a Unified Framework for Adaptable Problematic Content Detection via Continual Learning

The perception of offensive language varies based on cultural, social, and individual perspectives. With the spread of social media, there has been an increase in offensive content online, necessitating advanced solutions for its identification and moderation. This paper addresses the practical application of an offensive language taxonomy, specifically targeting Hebrew social media texts. By introducing a newly annotated dataset, modeled after the taxonomy of explicit offensive language of (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk et al., 2023),, we provide a comprehensive examination of various degrees and aspects of offensive language. Our findings indicate the complexities involved in the classification of such content. We also outline the implications of relying on fixed taxonomies for Hebrew.

From Linguistics to Practice: a Case Study of Offensive Language Taxonomy in Hebrew

With the use of algorithmic moderation on online communication platforms, an increase in adaptive language aiming to evade the automatic detection of problematic content has been observed. One form of this adapted language is known as "Algospeak" and is most commonly associated with large social media platforms, e.g., TikTok. It builds upon Leetspeak or online slang with its explicit intention to avoid machine readability. The machine-learning algorithms employed to automate the process of content moderation mostly rely on human-annotated datasets and supervised learning, often not adjusted for a wide variety of languages and changes in language. This work uses linguistic examples identified in research literature to introduce a taxonomy for Algospeak and shows that with the use of an LLM (GPT-4), 79.4% of the established terms can be corrected to their true form, or if needed, their underlying associated concepts. With an example sentence, 98.5% of terms are correctly identified. This research demonstrates that LLMs are the future in solving the current problem of moderation avoidance by Algospeak.

Simple LLM based Approach to Counter Algospeak

Studies on detecting and understanding the spread of unreliable news on social media have identified key characteristic differences between reliable and unreliable posts. These differences in language use also vary in expression across individuals, making it important to consider personal factors in unreliable news detection. The application of personalization methods for this has been made possible by recent publication of datasets with user histories, though this area is still largely unexplored. In this paper we present approaches to represent social media users in order to improve performance on three tasks: (1) classification of unreliable news posts, (2) classification of unreliable news spreaders, and, (3) prediction of the spread of unreliable news. We compare the User2Vec method from previous work to two other approaches; a learnable user embedding layer trained with the downstream task, and a representation derived from an authorship attribution classifier. We demonstrate that the implemented strategies substantially improve classification performance over state-of-the-art and provide initial results on the task of unreliable news prediction.

Harnessing Personalization Methods to Identify and Predict Unreliable Information Spreader Behavior

Large Language Models' safety remains a critical concern due to their vulnerability to jailbreaking attacks, which can prompt these systems to produce harmful and malicious responses. Safety classifiers, computational models trained to discern and mitigate potentially harmful, offensive, or unethical outputs, offer a practical solution to address this issue. However, despite their potential, existing safety classifiers often fail when exposed to adversarial attacks such as gradient-optimized suffix attacks. In response, our study introduces Adversarial Prompt Shield (APS), a lightweight safety classifier model that excels in detection accuracy and demonstrates resilience against unseen jailbreaking prompts. We also introduce efficiently generated adversarial training datasets, named Bot Adversarial Noisy Dialogue (BAND), which are designed to fortify the classifier's robustness. Through extensive testing on various safety tasks and unseen jailbreaking attacks, we demonstrate the effectiveness and resilience of our models. Evaluations show that our classifier has the potential to significantly reduce the Attack Success Rate by up to 44.9%. This advance paves the way for the next generation of more reliable and resilient Large Language Models.

Robust Safety Classifier Against Jailbreaking Attacks: Adversarial Prompt Shield

Cyberbullying has grown in recent years, largely attributed to the proliferation of social media users. This phenomenon manifests in various forms, such as hate speech and offensive language, increasing the necessity of effective detection models to tackle this problem. Most approaches focus on supervised algorithms, which have an important drawback—they heavily depend on the availability of ample training data. This paper attempts to tackle this insufficient data problem using data augmentation (DA) techniques. Concretely, we propose a novel data augmentation technique based on a Diffusion Language Model (DLA). We compare our proposed method against well-known DA techniques, such as contextual augmentation and Easy Data Augmentation (EDA). Our findings reveal a slight but promising improvement, leading to more robust results with very low variance. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive qualitative analysis using classification errors, and complementary analysis, shedding light on the nuances of our approach.

Improving aggressiveness detection using a data augmentation technique based on a Diffusion Language Model

Thanks to the popularity of social media, data generated by online communities provides an abundant source of diverse language information. This abundance of data allows NLP practitioners and computational linguists to analyze sociolinguistic phenomena occurring in digital communication. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter discourse around the Mexican Spanish-speaking LGBT+ community. For this, we evaluate how the polarity of some nouns related to the LGBT+ community has evolved in conversational settings using a corpus of tweets that cover a time span of ten years. We hypothesize that social media's fast-moving, turbulent linguistic environment encourages language evolution faster than ever before. Our results indicate that most of the inspected terms have undergone some shift in denotation or connotation. No other generalizations can be observed in the data, given the difficulty that current NLP methods have to account for polysemy, and the wide differences between the various subgroups that make up the LGBT+ community. A fine-grained analysis of a series of LGBT+-related lexical terms is also included in this work.

The Mexican Gayze: A Computational Analysis of the Attitudes towards the LGBT+ Population in Mexico on Social Media Across a Decade

We present a multi-agent automated fact-checking approach for detecting misinformation by combining an offline LLM agent for claim decomposition with an online web search agent for RAG. Specifically, we demonstrate that using Cohere Coral with a web connector, or DuckDuckGo summarized by GPT-3.5, for web search significantly enhances misinformation detection on the LIAR-New dataset. We evaluate our approach across 5 models, with macro F1 increasing by up to 20 percent.

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VIDA: The Visual Incel Data Archive. A Theory-oriented Annotated Dataset To Enhance Hate Detection Through Visual Culture

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