Following the outbreak of a global pandemic, online content is filled with hate speech. Donald Trump's ''Chinese Virus'' tweet shifted the blame for the spread of the Covid-19 virus to China and the Chinese people, which triggered a new round of anti-China hate both online and offline. This research intends to examine China-related hate speech on Twitter during the two years following the burst of the pandemic (2020 and 2021). Through Twitter's API, in total 2,172,333 tweets hashtagged #china posted during the time were collected. By employing multiple state-of-the-art pretrained language models for hate speech detection, we identify a wide range of hate of various types, resulting in an automatically labeled anti-China hate speech dataset. We identify a hateful rate in #china tweets of 2.5% in 2020 and 1.9% in 2021. This is well above the average rate of online hate speech on Twitter at 0.6% identified in Gao et al., 2017. We further analyzed the longitudinal development of #china tweets and those identified as hateful in 2020 and 2021 through visualizing the daily number and hate rate over the two years. Our keyword analysis of hate speech in #china tweets reveals the most frequently mentioned terms in the hateful #china tweets, which can be used for further social science studies.
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Singapore University of Design and Technology（新加坡科技设计大学）
Hateful meme classification is a challenging multimodal task that requires complex reasoning and contextual background knowledge. Ideally, we could leverage an explicit external knowledge base to supplement contextual and cultural information in hateful memes. However, there is no known explicit external knowledge base that could provide such hate speech contextual information. To address this gap, we propose PromptHate, a simple yet effective prompt-based model that prompts pre-trained language models (PLMs) for hateful meme classification. Specifically, we construct simple prompts and provid…
ExPO-HM: Learning to Explain-then-Detect for Hateful Meme Detection
Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学工程系）；Xiaohongshu Inc.（小红书公司）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）；Tencent Company, China（腾讯公司）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；Tongji University（同济大学）
Recent years have witnessed a swelling rise of hateful and abusive content over online social networks. While detection and moderation of hate speech have been the early go-to countermeasures, the solution requires a deeper exploration of the dynamics of hate generation and propagation. We analyze more than 32 million posts from over 6.8 million users across three popular online social networks to investigate the interrelations between hateful behavior, information dissemination, and polarised organization mediated by echo chambers. We find that hatemongers play a more crucial role in governin…
Evaluating Large Language Models for Antisemitic Incident Classification
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究院）
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…
Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）
Memes on the Internet are often harmless and sometimes amusing. However, by using certain types of images, text, or combinations of both, the seemingly harmless meme becomes a multimodal type of hate speech -- a hateful meme. The Hateful Memes Challenge is a first-of-its-kind competition which focuses on detecting hate speech in multimodal memes and it proposes a new data set containing 10,000+ new examples of multimodal content. We utilize VisualBERT -- which meant to be the BERT of vision and language -- that was trained multimodally on images and captions and apply Ensemble Learning. Our ap…
Pompeu Fabra University（庞培法布拉大学）；Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies（加泰罗尼亚研究与高级研究学院）；Barcelona Supercomputing Center（巴塞罗那超级计算中心）；Knorex（诺瑞克斯公司）
Irvington High School（欧文顿高中）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Hateful memes are an emerging method of spreading hate on the internet, relying on both images and text to convey a hateful message. We take an interpretable approach to hateful meme detection, using machine learning and simple heuristics to identify the features most important to classifying a meme as hateful. In the process, we build a gradient-boosted decision tree and an LSTM-based model that achieve comparable performance (73.8 validation and 72.7 test auROC) to the gold standard of humans and state-of-the-art transformer models on this challenging task.
Taibah University（泰巴大学）；University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Taif University（塔伊夫大学）
Arabic Twitter space is crawling with bots that fuel political feuds, spread misinformation, and proliferate sectarian rhetoric. While efforts have long existed to analyze and detect English bots, Arabic bot detection and characterization remains largely understudied. In this work, we contribute new insights into the role of bots in spreading religious hatred on Arabic Twitter and introduce a novel regression model that can accurately identify Arabic language bots. Our assessment shows that existing tools that are highly accurate in detecting English bots don't perform as well on Arabic bots. …
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
Online social platforms are beset with hateful speech - content that expresses hatred for a person or group of people. Such content can frighten, intimidate, or silence platform users, and some of it can inspire other users to commit violence. Despite widespread recognition of the problems posed by such content, reliable solutions even for detecting hateful speech are lacking. In the present work, we establish why keyword-based methods are insufficient for detection. We then propose an approach to detecting hateful speech that uses content produced by self-identifying hateful communities as tr…
Hateful Memes is a new challenge set for multimodal classification, focusing on detecting hate speech in multimodal memes. Difficult examples are added to the dataset to make it hard to rely on unimodal signals, which means only multimodal models can succeed. According to Kiela,the state-of-the-art methods perform poorly compared to humans (64.73% vs. 84.7% accuracy) on Hateful Memes. I propose a new model that combined multimodal with rules, which achieve the first ranking of accuracy and AUROC of 86.8% and 0.923 respectively. These rules are extracted from training set, and focus on improvin…
An increasingly common expression of online hate speech is multimodal in nature and comes in the form of memes. Designing systems to automatically detect hateful content is of paramount importance if we are to mitigate its undesirable effects on the society at large. The detection of multimodal hate speech is an intrinsically difficult and open problem: memes convey a message using both images and text and, hence, require multimodal reasoning and joint visual and language understanding. In this work, we seek to advance this line of research and develop a multimodal framework for the detection …
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
Hate speech is regarded as one of the crucial issues plaguing the online social media. The current literature on hate speech detection leverages primarily the textual content to find hateful posts and subsequently identify hateful users. However, this methodology disregards the social connections between users. In this paper, we run a detailed exploration of the problem space and investigate an array of models ranging from purely textual to graph based to finally semi-supervised techniques using Graph Neural Networks (GNN) that utilize both textual and graph-based features. We run exhaustive e…
This work proposes a new challenge set for multimodal classification, focusing on detecting hate speech in multimodal memes. It is constructed such that unimodal models struggle and only multimodal models can succeed: difficult examples ("benign confounders") are added to the dataset to make it hard to rely on unimodal signals. The task requires subtle reasoning, yet is straightforward to evaluate as a binary classification problem. We provide baseline performance numbers for unimodal models, as well as for multimodal models with various degrees of sophistication. We find that state-of-the-art…
Singapore University of Design and Technology（新加坡设计与科技大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Hateful and offensive content detection has been extensively explored in a single modality such as text. However, such toxic information could also be communicated via multimodal content such as online memes. Therefore, detecting multimodal hateful content has recently garnered much attention in academic and industry research communities. This paper aims to contribute to this emerging research topic by proposing DisMultiHate, which is a novel framework that performed the classification of multimodal hateful content. Specifically, DisMultiHate is designed to disentangle target entities in multi…
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…
Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Hateful memes are a growing menace on social media. While the image and its corresponding text in a meme are related, they do not necessarily convey the same meaning when viewed individually. Hence, detecting hateful memes requires careful consideration of both visual and textual information. Multimodal pre-training can be beneficial for this task because it effectively captures the relationship between the image and the text by representing them in a similar feature space. Furthermore, it is essential to model the interactions between the image and text features through intermediate fusion. M…
In this research, we investigate techniques to detect hate speech in movies. We introduce a new dataset collected from the subtitles of six movies, where each utterance is annotated either as hate, offensive or normal. We apply transfer learning techniques of domain adaptation and fine-tuning on existing social media datasets, namely from Twitter and Fox News. We evaluate different representations, i.e., Bag of Words (BoW), Bi-directional Long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM), and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) on 11k movie subtitles. The BERT model obtained the best…
While significant progress has been made using machine learning algorithms to detect hate speech, important technical challenges still remain to be solved in order to bring their performance closer to human accuracy. We investigate several of the most recent visual-linguistic Transformer architectures and propose improvements to increase their performance for this task. The proposed model outperforms the baselines by a large margin and ranks 5$^{th}$ on the leaderboard out of 3,100+ participants.
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）；Delhi Technological University（德里理工大学）
The extensive rise in consumption of online social media (OSMs) by a large number of people poses a critical problem of curbing the spread of hateful content on these platforms. With the growing usage of OSMs in multiple languages, the task of detecting and characterizing hate becomes more complex. The subtle variations of code-mixed texts along with switching scripts only add to the complexity. This paper presents a solution for the HASOC 2021 Multilingual Twitter Hate-Speech Detection challenge by team PreCog IIIT Hyderabad. We adopt a multilingual transformer based approach and describe our…
Recent studies have alarmed that many online hate speeches are implicit. With its subtle nature, the explainability of the detection of such hateful speech has been a challenging problem. In this work, we examine whether ChatGPT can be used for providing natural language explanations (NLEs) for implicit hateful speech detection. We design our prompt to elicit concise ChatGPT-generated NLEs and conduct user studies to evaluate their qualities by comparison with human-written NLEs. We discuss the potential and limitations of ChatGPT in the context of implicit hateful speech research.
Beyond Denouncing Hate: Strategies for Countering Implied Biases and Stereotypes in Language
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
The rise of hate speech on online platforms has led to an urgent need for effective content moderation. However, the subjective and multi-faceted nature of hateful online content, including implicit hate speech, poses significant challenges to human moderators and content moderation systems. To address this issue, we developed ToxVis, a visually interactive and explainable tool for classifying hate speech into three categories: implicit, explicit, and non-hateful. We fine-tuned two transformer-based models using RoBERTa, XLNET, and GPT-3 and used deep learning interpretation techniques to prov…
Symbiosis Institute of Technology（共生理工学院）；Symbiosis Centre for Applied Artificial Intelligence（共生应用人工智能中心）
Social networking platforms provide a conduit to disseminate our ideas, views and thoughts and proliferate information. This has led to the amalgamation of English with natively spoken languages. Prevalence of Hindi-English code-mixed data (Hinglish) is on the rise with most of the urban population all over the world. Hate speech detection algorithms deployed by most social networking platforms are unable to filter out offensive and abusive content posted in these code-mixed languages. Thus, the worldwide hate speech detection rate of around 44% drops even more considering the content in India…
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
Hateful and Toxic content has become a significant concern in today's world due to an exponential rise in social media. The increase in hate speech and harmful content motivated researchers to dedicate substantial efforts to the challenging direction of hateful content identification. In this task, we propose an approach to automatically classify hate speech and offensive content. We have used the datasets obtained from FIRE 2019 and 2020 shared tasks. We perform experiments by taking advantage of transfer learning models. We observed that the pre-trained BERT model and the multilingual-BERT m…
In recent years, monitoring hate speech and offensive language on social media platforms has become paramount due to its widespread usage among all age groups, races, and ethnicities. Consequently, there have been substantial research efforts towards automated detection of such content using Natural Language Processing (NLP). While successfully filtering textual data, no research has focused on detecting hateful content in multimedia data. With increased ease of data storage and the exponential growth of social media platforms, multimedia content proliferates the internet as much as text data.…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）
Social media often serves as a breeding ground for various hateful and offensive content. Identifying such content on social media is crucial due to its impact on the race, gender, or religion in an unprejudiced society. However, while there is extensive research in hate speech detection in English, there is a gap in hateful content detection in low-resource languages like Bengali. Besides, a current trend on social media is the use of Romanized Bengali for regular interactions. To overcome the existing research's limitations, in this study, we develop an annotated dataset of 10K Bengali posts…
CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎综合理工学院）
Generated hateful and toxic content by a portion of users in social media is a rising phenomenon that motivated researchers to dedicate substantial efforts to the challenging direction of hateful content identification. We not only need an efficient automatic hate speech detection model based on advanced machine learning and natural language processing, but also a sufficiently large amount of annotated data to train a model. The lack of a sufficient amount of labelled hate speech data, along with the existing biases, has been the main issue in this domain of research. To address these needs, i…
