In the current era of the internet, where social media platforms are easily accessible for everyone, people often have to deal with threats, identity attacks, hate, and bullying due to their association with a cast, creed, gender, religion, or even acceptance or rejection of a notion. Existing works in hate speech detection primarily focus on individual comment classification as a sequence labeling task and often fail to consider the context of the conversation. The context of a conversation often plays a substantial role when determining the author's intent and sentiment behind the tweet. This paper describes the system proposed by team MIDAS-IIITD for HASOC 2021 subtask 2, one of the first shared tasks focusing on detecting hate speech from Hindi-English code-mixed conversations on Twitter. We approach this problem using neural networks, leveraging the transformer's cross-lingual embeddings and further finetuning them for low-resource hate-speech classification in transliterated Hindi text. Our best performing system, a hard voting ensemble of Indic-BERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and Multilingual BERT, achieved a macro F1 score of 0.7253, placing us first on the overall leaderboard standings.
Hate speech detection research has predominantly focused on purely content-based methods, without exploiting any additional context. We briefly critique pros and cons of this task formulation. We then investigate profiling users by their past utterances as an informative prior to better predict whether new utterances constitute hate speech. To evaluate this, we augment three Twitter hate speech datasets with additional timeline data, then embed this additional context into a strong baseline model. Promising results suggest merit for further investigation, though analysis is complicated by diff…
This paper presents a unified user profiling framework to identify hate speech spreaders by processing their tweets regardless of the language. The framework encodes the tweets with sentence transformers and applies an attention mechanism to select important tweets for learning user profiles. Furthermore, the attention layer helps to explain why a user is a hate speech spreader by producing attention weights at both token and post level. Our proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art multilingual transformer models.
Punjab University College of Information Technology（旁遮普大学信息技术学院）；University of the Punjab（旁遮普大学）
Hate speech is a specific type of controversial content that is widely legislated as a crime that must be identified and blocked. However, due to the sheer volume and velocity of the Twitter data stream, hate speech detection cannot be performed manually. To address this issue, several studies have been conducted for hate speech detection in European languages, whereas little attention has been paid to low-resource South Asian languages, making the social media vulnerable for millions of users. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, no study has been conducted for hate speech detection i…
Accurate detection of hate speech against politicians, policy making and political ideas is crucial to maintain democracy and free speech. Unfortunately, the amount of labelled data necessary for training models to detect hate speech are limited and domain-dependent. In this paper, we address the issue of classification of hate speech against policy makers from Twitter in Italian, producing the first resource of this type in this language. We collected and annotated 1264 tweets, examined the cases of disagreements between annotators, and performed in-domain and cross-domain hate speech classif…
Pune Institute of Computer Technology（浦那计算机技术学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Pre-training large neural language models, such as BERT, has led to impressive gains on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Although this method has proven to be effective for many domains, it might not always provide desirable benefits. In this paper, we study the effects of hateful pre-training on low-resource hate speech classification tasks. While previous studies on the English language have emphasized its importance, we aim to augment their observations with some non-obvious insights. We evaluate different variations of tweet-based BERT models pre-trained on hateful, non-hatefu…
This paper reports an increment to the state-of-the-art in hate speech detection for English-Hindi code-mixed tweets. We compare three typical deep learning models using domain-specific embeddings. On experimenting with a benchmark dataset of English-Hindi code-mixed tweets, we observe that using domain-specific embeddings results in an improved representation of target groups, and an improved F-score.
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
Hate speech detection is a critical, yet challenging problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Despite the existence of numerous studies dedicated to the development of NLP hate speech detection approaches, the accuracy is still poor. The central problem is that social media posts are short and noisy, and most existing hate speech detection solutions take each post as an isolated input instance, which is likely to yield high false positive and negative rates. In this paper, we radically improve automated hate speech detection by presenting a novel model that leverages intra-user and inter-…
In the past few years, there has been a significant rise in toxic and hateful content on various social media platforms. Recently Black Lives Matter movement came into the picture, causing an avalanche of user generated responses on the internet. In this paper, we have proposed a Black Lives Matter related tweet hate speech dataset TweetBLM. Our dataset comprises 9165 manually annotated tweets that target the Black Lives Matter movement. We annotated the tweets into two classes, i.e., HATE and NONHATE based on their content related to racism erupted from the movement for the black community. I…
Pune Institute of Computer Technology（浦那计算机技术学院）；L3Cube Pune（浦那L3Cube）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Social media platforms are used by a large number of people prominently to express their thoughts and opinions. However, these platforms have contributed to a substantial amount of hateful and abusive content as well. Therefore, it is important to curb the spread of hate speech on these platforms. In India, Marathi is one of the most popular languages used by a wide audience. In this work, we present L3Cube-MahaHate, the first major Hate Speech Dataset in Marathi. The dataset is curated from Twitter, annotated manually. Our dataset consists of over 25000 distinct tweets labeled into four major…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）
A key challenge for automatic hate-speech detection on social media is the separation of hate speech from other instances of offensive language. Lexical detection methods tend to have low precision because they classify all messages containing particular terms as hate speech and previous work using supervised learning has failed to distinguish between the two categories. We used a crowd-sourced hate speech lexicon to collect tweets containing hate speech keywords. We use crowd-sourcing to label a sample of these tweets into three categories: those containing hate speech, only offensive languag…
Hate speech detection on Twitter is critical for applications like controversial event extraction, building AI chatterbots, content recommendation, and sentiment analysis. We define this task as being able to classify a tweet as racist, sexist or neither. The complexity of the natural language constructs makes this task very challenging. We perform extensive experiments with multiple deep learning architectures to learn semantic word embeddings to handle this complexity. Our experiments on a benchmark dataset of 16K annotated tweets show that such deep learning methods outperform state-of-the-…
Online presence on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter has become a daily habit for internet users. Despite the vast amount of services the platforms offer for their users, users suffer from cyber-bullying, which further leads to mental abuse and may escalate to cause physical harm to individuals or targeted groups. In this paper, we present our submission to the Arabic Hate Speech 2022 Shared Task Workshop (OSACT5 2022) using the associated Arabic Twitter dataset. The shared task consists of 3 sub-tasks, sub-task A focuses on detecting whether the tweet is offensive or not. Th…
Predicting Hate Intensity of Twitter Conversation Threads
Hohai University（河海大学）；IIIT Delhi（德里英迪拉·甘地信息技术学院）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校）
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学牛津互联网研究院）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究院）
Islamophobic hate speech on social media inflicts considerable harm on both targeted individuals and wider society, and also risks reputational damage for the host platforms. Accordingly, there is a pressing need for robust tools to detect and classify Islamophobic hate speech at scale. Previous research has largely approached the detection of Islamophobic hate speech on social media as a binary task. However, the varied nature of Islamophobia means that this is often inappropriate for both theoretically-informed social science and effectively monitoring social media. Drawing on in-depth conce…
Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
We introduce a generic, language-independent method to collect a large percentage of offensive and hate tweets regardless of their topics or genres. We harness the extralinguistic information embedded in the emojis to collect a large number of offensive tweets. We apply the proposed method on Arabic tweets and compare it with English tweets - analysing key cultural differences. We observed a constant usage of these emojis to represent offensiveness throughout different timespans on Twitter. We manually annotate and publicly release the largest Arabic dataset for offensive, fine-grained hate sp…
University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
Hate speech is plaguing the cyberspace along with user-generated content. This paper investigates the role of conversational context in the annotation and detection of online hate and counter speech, where context is defined as the preceding comment in a conversation thread. We created a context-aware dataset for a 3-way classification task on Reddit comments: hate speech, counter speech, or neutral. Our analyses indicate that context is critical to identify hate and counter speech: human judgments change for most comments depending on whether we show annotators the context. A linguistic analy…
Algorithms are widely applied to detect hate speech and abusive language in social media. We investigated whether the human-annotated data used to train these algorithms are biased. We utilized a publicly available annotated Twitter dataset (Founta et al. 2018) and classified the racial, gender, and party identification dimensions of 99,996 tweets. The results showed that African American tweets were up to 3.7 times more likely to be labeled as abusive, and African American male tweets were up to 77% more likely to be labeled as hateful compared to the others. These patterns were statistically…
Universidad de Buenos Aires（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学）；Universidad Nacional de Córdoba（科尔多瓦国立大学）
We present an enrichment of the Hateval corpus of hate speech tweets (Basile et. al 2019) aimed to facilitate automated counter-narrative generation. Comparably to previous work (Chung et. al. 2019), manually written counter-narratives are associated to tweets. However, this information alone seems insufficient to obtain satisfactory language models for counter-narrative generation. That is why we have also annotated tweets with argumentative information based on Wagemanns (2016), that we believe can help in building convincing and effective counter-narratives for hate speech against particula…
Jinan University（暨南大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Jinan University - University of Birmingham Joint Institute（暨南大学-伯明翰大学联合学院）
With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing, hatred against Asians is intensifying in countries outside Asia, especially among the Chinese. There is an urgent need to detect and prevent hate speech towards Asians effectively. In this work, we first create COVID-HATE-2022, an annotated dataset including 2,025 annotated tweets fetched in early February 2022, which are labeled based on specific criteria, and we present the comprehensive collection of scenarios of hate and non-hate tweets in the dataset. Second, we fine-tune the BERT model based on the relevant datasets and demonstrate several strategie…
We describe our top-team solution to Task 1 for Hindi in the HASOC contest organised by FIRE 2019. The task is to identify hate speech and offensive language in Hindi. More specifically, it is a binary classification problem where a system is required to classify tweets into two classes: (a) \emph{Hate and Offensive (HOF)} and (b) \emph{Not Hate or Offensive (NOT)}. In contrast to the popular idea of pretraining word vectors (a.k.a. word embedding) with a large corpus from a general domain such as Wikipedia, we used a relatively small collection of relevant tweets (i.e. random and sarcasm twee…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）
The spread of COVID-19 has sparked racism and hate on social media targeted towards Asian communities. However, little is known about how racial hate spreads during a pandemic and the role of counterspeech in mitigating this spread. In this work, we study the evolution and spread of anti-Asian hate speech through the lens of Twitter. We create COVID-HATE, the largest dataset of anti-Asian hate and counterspeech spanning 14 months, containing over 206 million tweets, and a social network with over 127 million nodes. By creating a novel hand-labeled dataset of 3,355 tweets, we train a text class…
Dealing with Annotator Disagreement in Hate Speech Classification
Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey（工程与自然科学学院，Sabanci大学，伊斯坦布尔，土耳其）；Center of Excellence in Data Analytics (VERIM), Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey（数据分析卓越中心（VERIM），Sabanci大学，伊斯坦布尔，土耳其）
Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS), LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学信息与语言处理中心（CIS））
To tackle the rising phenomenon of hate speech, efforts have been made towards data curation and analysis. When it comes to analysis of bias, previous work has focused predominantly on race. In our work, we further investigate bias in hate speech datasets along racial, gender and intersectional axes. We identify strong bias against African American English (AAE), masculine and AAE+Masculine tweets, which are annotated as disproportionately more hateful and offensive than from other demographics. We provide evidence that BERT-based models propagate this bias and show that balancing the training…
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Kalyani（印度信息技术学院卡利亚尼分校）
Social media has seen a worrying rise in hate speech in recent times. Branching to several distinct categories of cyberbullying, gender discrimination, or racism, the combined label for such derogatory content can be classified as toxic content in general. This paper presents experimentation with a Keras wrapped lightweight BERT model to successfully identify hate speech and predict probabilistic impact score for the same to extract the hateful words within sentences. The dataset used for this task is the Hate Speech and Offensive Content Detection (HASOC 2021) data from FIRE 2021 in English. …
Hate speech on social media is a growing concern, and automated methods have so far been sub-par at reliably detecting it. A major challenge lies in the potentially evasive nature of hate speech due to the ambiguity and fast evolution of natural language. To tackle this, we introduce a vectorisation based on a crowd-sourced and continuously updated dictionary of hate words and propose fusing this approach with standard word embedding in order to improve the classification performance of a CNN model. To train and test our model we use a merge of two established datasets (110,748 tweets in total…
University of Haifa（海法大学）；Braude College of Engineering（布劳德工程学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Hate speech detection is a critical problem in social media platforms, being often accused for enabling the spread of hatred and igniting physical violence. Hate speech detection requires overwhelming resources including high-performance computing for online posts and tweets monitoring as well as thousands of human experts for daily screening of suspected posts or tweets. Recently, Deep Learning (DL)-based solutions have been proposed for automatic detection of hate speech, using modest-sized training datasets of few thousands of hate speech sequences. While these methods perform well on the s…
The performance of hate speech detection models relies on the datasets on which the models are trained. Existing datasets are mostly prepared with a limited number of instances or hate domains that define hate topics. This hinders large-scale analysis and transfer learning with respect to hate domains. In this study, we construct large-scale tweet datasets for hate speech detection in English and a low-resource language, Turkish, consisting of human-labeled 100k tweets per each. Our datasets are designed to have equal number of tweets distributed over five domains. The experimental results sup…
Research Centre on Scientific and Technical Information (CERIST)（科学技术信息研究中心）
Along with the COVID-19 pandemic, an "infodemic" of false and misleading information has emerged and has complicated the COVID-19 response efforts. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have contributed largely to the spread of rumors, conspiracy theories, hate, xenophobia, racism, and prejudice. To combat the spread of fake news, researchers around the world have and are still making considerable efforts to build and share COVID-19 related research articles, models, and datasets. This paper releases "AraCOVID19-MFH" a manually annotated multi-label Arabic COVID-19 fake news and…
Technologies for abusive language detection are being developed and applied with little consideration of their potential biases. We examine racial bias in five different sets of Twitter data annotated for hate speech and abusive language. We train classifiers on these datasets and compare the predictions of these classifiers on tweets written in African-American English with those written in Standard American English. The results show evidence of systematic racial bias in all datasets, as classifiers trained on them tend to predict that tweets written in African-American English are abusive at…
Indian Institute of Information Technology Sri City（斯里城印度信息技术学院）；Wipro AI Labs（威普罗人工智能实验室）
Contending hate speech in social media is one of the most challenging social problems of our time. There are various types of anti-social behavior in social media. Foremost of them is aggressive behavior, which is causing many social issues such as affecting the social lives and mental health of social media users. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end ensemble-based architecture to automatically identify and classify aggressive tweets. Tweets are classified into three categories - Covertly Aggressive, Overtly Aggressive, and Non-Aggressive. The proposed architecture is an ensemble of smalle…
Toxic online speech has become a crucial problem nowadays due to an exponential increase in the use of internet by people from different cultures and educational backgrounds. Differentiating if a text message belongs to hate speech and offensive language is a key challenge in automatic detection of toxic text content. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically classify tweets into three classes: Hate, offensive and Neither. Using public tweet data set, we first perform experiments to build BI-LSTM models from empty embedding and then we also try the same neural network architecture…
Online hate speech, particularly over microblogging platforms like Twitter, has emerged as arguably the most severe issue of the past decade. Several countries have reported a steep rise in hate crimes infuriated by malicious hate campaigns. While the detection of hate speech is one of the emerging research areas, the generation and spread of topic-dependent hate in the information network remain under-explored. In this work, we focus on exploring user behaviour, which triggers the genesis of hate speech on Twitter and how it diffuses via retweets. We crawl a large-scale dataset of tweets, ret…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；TOBB Economy and Tech. University（TOBB经济与技术大学）
Building a benchmark dataset for hate speech detection presents various challenges. Firstly, because hate speech is relatively rare, random sampling of tweets to annotate is very inefficient in finding hate speech. To address this, prior datasets often include only tweets matching known "hate words". However, restricting data to a pre-defined vocabulary may exclude portions of the real-world phenomenon we seek to model. A second challenge is that definitions of hate speech tend to be highly varying and subjective. Annotators having diverse prior notions of hate speech may not only disagree wit…
Télécom SudParis（南巴黎电信学院）；Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院）
Disparate biases associated with datasets and trained classifiers in hateful and abusive content identification tasks have raised many concerns recently. Although the problem of biased datasets on abusive language detection has been addressed more frequently, biases arising from trained classifiers have not yet been a matter of concern. Here, we first introduce a transfer learning approach for hate speech detection based on an existing pre-trained language model called BERT and evaluate the proposed model on two publicly available datasets annotated for racism, sexism, hate or offensive conten…
University of Tyumen（秋明大学）；Thales Canada（泰雷兹加拿大公司）
This paper describes neural models developed for the Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in English and Indo-Aryan Languages Shared Task 2021. Our team called neuro-utmn-thales participated in two tasks on binary and fine-grained classification of English tweets that contain hate, offensive, and profane content (English Subtasks A & B) and one task on identification of problematic content in Marathi (Marathi Subtask A). For English subtasks, we investigate the impact of additional corpora for hate speech detection to fine-tune transformer models. We also apply a one-vs-rest approa…
Dublin Institute of Technology（都柏林理工学院）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
As research on hate speech becomes more and more relevant every day, most of it is still focused on hate speech detection. By attempting to replicate a hate speech detection experiment performed on an existing Twitter corpus annotated for hate speech, we highlight some issues that arise from doing research in the field of hate speech, which is essentially still in its infancy. We take a critical look at the training corpus in order to understand its biases, while also using it to venture beyond hate speech detection and investigate whether it can be used to shed light on other facets of resear…
In this paper, we tackle the Arabic Fine-Grained Hate Speech Detection shared task and demonstrate significant improvements over reported baselines for its three subtasks. The tasks are to predict if a tweet contains (1) Offensive language; and whether it is considered (2) Hate Speech or not and if so, then predict the (3) Fine-Grained Hate Speech label from one of six categories. Our final solution is an ensemble of models that employs multitask learning and a self-consistency correction method yielding 82.7% on the hate speech subtask -- reflecting a 3.4% relative improvement compared to pre…
In the wake of a polarizing election, social media is laden with hateful content. To address various limitations of supervised hate speech classification methods including corpus bias and huge cost of annotation, we propose a weakly supervised two-path bootstrapping approach for an online hate speech detection model leveraging large-scale unlabeled data. This system significantly outperforms hate speech detection systems that are trained in a supervised manner using manually annotated data. Applying this model on a large quantity of tweets collected before, after, and on election day reveals m…
Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur（希布尔印度工程科学技术研究院）；Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
With the online proliferation of hate speech, there is an urgent need for systems that can detect such harmful content. In this paper, We present the machine learning models developed for the Automatic Misogyny Identification (AMI) shared task at EVALITA 2018. We generate three types of features: Sentence Embeddings, TF-IDF Vectors, and BOW Vectors to represent each tweet. These features are then concatenated and fed into the machine learning models. Our model came First for the English Subtask A and Fifth for the English Subtask B. We release our winning model for public use and it's availabl…
NaijaHate: Evaluating Hate Speech Detection on Nigerian Twitter Using Representative Data
The World Bank（世界银行）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Universidade Federal de Goiás（戈亚斯联邦大学）；Ecole Normale Supérieure（巴黎高等师范学院）；Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin（苏丹再纳阿比丁大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Content warning: This work displays examples of explicit and/or strongly offensive language. Fueled by a surge of anti-Asian xenophobia and prejudice during the COVID-19 pandemic, many have taken to social media to express these negative sentiments. Identifying these posts is crucial for moderation and understanding the nature of hate in online spaces. In this paper, we create and annotate a corpus of tweets to explore anti-Asian hate speech with a finer level of granularity. Our analysis reveals that this emergent form of hate speech often eludes established approaches. To address this challe…
Bayero University（巴耶罗大学）；Modibbo Adama University（莫迪博·阿达玛大学）；HausaNLP（豪萨语自然语言处理）；LIAAD-INESC TEC；Ahmadu Bello University（艾哈迈德·贝罗大学）
Social media platforms allow users to freely share their opinions about issues or anything they feel like. However, they also make it easier to spread hate and abusive content. The Fulani ethnic group has been the victim of this unfortunate phenomenon. This paper introduces the HERDPhobia - the first annotated hate speech dataset on Fulani herders in Nigeria - in three languages: English, Nigerian-Pidgin, and Hausa. We present a benchmark experiment using pre-trained languages models to classify the tweets as either hateful or non-hateful. Our experiment shows that the XML-T model provides bet…
University of Lorraine（洛林大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Loria（洛林计算机科学及其应用实验室）
The task of automatically detecting hate speech in social media is gaining more and more attention. Given the enormous volume of content posted daily, human monitoring of hate speech is unfeasible. In this work, we propose new word-level features for automatic hate speech detection (HSD): multiword expressions (MWEs). MWEs are lexical units greater than a word that have idiomatic and compositional meanings. We propose to integrate MWE features in a deep neural network-based HSD framework. Our baseline HSD system relies on Universal Sentence Encoder (USE). To incorporate MWE features, we create…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Intel AI（英特尔人工智能）
Countering online hate speech is a critical yet challenging task, but one which can be aided by the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Previous research has primarily focused on the development of NLP methods to automatically and effectively detect online hate speech while disregarding further action needed to calm and discourage individuals from using hate speech in the future. In addition, most existing hate speech datasets treat each post as an isolated instance, ignoring the conversational context. In this paper, we propose a novel task of generative hate speech intervent…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）
This paper describes the UM-IU@LING's system for the SemEval 2019 Task 6: OffensEval. We take a mixed approach to identify and categorize hate speech in social media. In subtask A, we fine-tuned a BERT based classifier to detect abusive content in tweets, achieving a macro F1 score of 0.8136 on the test data, thus reaching the 3rd rank out of 103 submissions. In subtasks B and C, we used a linear SVM with selected character n-gram features. For subtask C, our system could identify the target of abuse with a macro F1 score of 0.5243, ranking it 27th out of 65 submissions.
