Listening to Affected Communities to Define Extreme Speech: Dataset and Experiments

Maronikolakis, Antonis; Wisiorek, Axel ; Nann, Leah; Jabbar, Haris; Udupa, Sahana and Schütze, Hinrich (May 2022): Listening to Affected Communities to Define Extreme Speech: Dataset and Experiments. ACL 2022, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022. Mureșan, Smaranda; Nakov, Preslav and Villavicencio, Aline (eds.) : In: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022, Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 1089-1104

Abstract

Building on current work on multilingual hate speech (e.g., Ousidhoum et al. (2019)) and hate speech reduction (e.g., Sap et al. (2020)), we present XTREMESPEECH, a new hate speech dataset containing 20,297 social media passages from Brazil, Germany, India and Kenya. The key novelty is that we directly involve the affected communities in collecting and annotating the data – as opposed to giving companies and governments control over defining and combatting hate speech. This inclusive approach results in datasets more representative of actually occurring online speech and is likely to facilitate the removal of the social media content that marginalized communities view as causing the most harm. Based on XTREMESPEECH, we establish novel tasks with accompanying baselines, provide evidence that cross-country training is generally not feasible due to cultural differences between countries and perform an interpretability analysis of BERT’s predictions.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
• EU Funded Grant Agreement Number: 957442
• Faculties: Cultural Studies > Department of Ancient and Modern Cultures > Ethnology
• Research Centers: Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS)
• Subjects: 000 Computer science, information and general works > 000 Computer science, knowledge, and systems; 400 Language > 400 Language; 400 Language > 410 Linguistics
• Place of Publication: Stroudsburg, PA
• Language: English