Hate Speech and Counter Speech Detection: Conversational Context Does Matter

Xinchen Yu, Eduardo Blanco, Lingzi Hong

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

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 analysis draws insights into the language people use to express hate and counter speech. Experimental results show that neural networks obtain significantly better results if context is taken into account. We also present qualitative error analyses shedding light into (a) when and why context is beneficial and (b) the remaining errors made by our best model when context is taken into account.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationNAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages5918-5930
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917711
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022 - Seattle, United States
Duration: Jul 10 2022Jul 15 2022

Publication series

NameNAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period7/10/227/15/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems
  • Software

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