Targets and aspects in social media hate speech

Shvets, Alexander; Fortuna, Paula; Wanner, Leo

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.woah-1.19

Targets and aspects in social media hate speech

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Citation

Shvets A, Fortuna P, Soler-Company J, Wanner L. Targets and aspects in social media hate speech. In: Mostafazadeh Davani A, Kiela D, Lambert M, Vidgen B, Prabhakaran V, Waseem Z. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2021); 2021 Aug 6; Bangkok, Thailand. Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics; 2021. p. 179-90. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2021.woah-1.19

Abstract

Mainstream research on hate speech focused so far predominantly on the task of classifying mainly social media posts with respect to predefined typologies of rather coarse-grained hate speech categories. This may be sufficient if the goal is to detect and delete abusive language posts. However, removal is not always possible due to the legislation of a country. Also, there is evidence that hate speech cannot be successfully combated by merely removing hate speech posts; they should be countered by education and counter-narratives. For this purpose, we need to identify (i) who is the target in a given hate speech post, and (ii) what aspects (or characteristics) of the target are attributed to the target in the post. As the first approximation, we propose to adapt a generic state-of-the-art concept extraction model to the hate speech domain. The outcome of the experiments is promising and can serve as inspiration for further work on the task.