Canada

Online communities of involuntary celibates (incels) are a prominent source of misogynist hate speech. In this paper, we use quantitative text and network analysis approaches to examine how identity groups are discussed on incels.is, the largest black-pilled incels forum. We find that this community produces a wide range of novel identity terms and, while terms for women are most common, mentions of other minoritized identities are increasing. An analysis of the associations made with identity groups suggests an essentialist ideology where physical appearance, as well as gender and racial hierarchies, determine human value. We discuss implications for research into automated misogynist hate speech detection.

ACL 2023

Identity Construction in a Misogynist Incels Forum

incels

misogyny

identity

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Over the past few years, much research has been conducted to identify and regulate toxic language. However, few studies have addressed a broader range of sensitive texts that are not necessarily overtly toxic. In this paper, we introduce and define a new category of sensitive text called "delicate text." We provide the taxonomy of delicate text and present a detailed annotation scheme. We annotate DeTexD, the first benchmark dataset for delicate text detection. The significance of the difference in the definitions is highlighted by the relative performance deltas between models trained each definitions and corpora and evaluated on the other. We make publicly available the DeTexD Benchmark dataset, annotation guidelines, and baseline model for delicate text detection.

DeTexD: A Benchmark Dataset for Delicate Text Detection

Cyberbullying is a serious societal issue widespread on various channels and 
platforms, particularly social networking sites. Such platforms have proven to be exceptionally fertile grounds for such behavior. The dearth of high-quality training data for multilingual and low-resource scenarios, data that can accurately capture the nuances of social media conversations, often poses a roadblock to this task. This paper attempts to tackle cyberbullying, specifically its two most common manifestations - aggression and offensiveness. We present a novel dataset of a total of 10, 000 English and Hindi-English code-mixed tweets, manually annotated for aggression detection and offensive language detection tasks. Our annotations are supported by inter-annotator agreement scores of 0.67 and 0.74 for the two tasks, indicating substantial agreement. We perform comprehensive fine-tuning of pre-trained language models (PTLMs) using this dataset to check its efficacy. Our challenging test sets show that the best models achieve macro F1-scores of 67.87 and 65.45 on the two tasks, respectively. Further, we perform cross-dataset transfer learning to benchmark our dataset against existing aggression and offensive language datasets. We also present a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of errors in prediction, and with this paper, we publicly release the novel dataset, code, and models.

Towards Safer Communities: Detecting Aggression and Offensive Language in Code-Mixed Tweets to Combat Cyberbullying

As pointed out by several scholars, current research on hate speech (HS) recognition is characterized by unsystematic data creation strategies and diverging annotation schemata. Subsequently, supervised-learning models tend to generalize poorly to datasets they were not trained on, and the performance of the models trained on datasets labeled using different HS taxonomies cannot be compared. To ease this problem, we propose applying extremely weak supervision that only relies on the class name rather than on class samples from the annotated data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of a state-of-the-art weakly-supervised text classification model in various in-dataset and cross-dataset settings. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of the source of poor generalizability of HS classification models.

Towards Weakly-Supervised Hate Speech Classification Across Datasets

The ground truth in classification tasks is often approximated by the fraction of annotators who classified an item as belonging to the positive class. Instances for which this fraction is equal to or above 50% are considered positive, including however ones that receive polarized opinions. This is a problematic encoding convention that disregards the potentially polarized nature of opinions and which is often employed to estimate abusive language. We present the distance from unimodality (DFU), a measure that estimates the extent of polarization on the distribution of opinions and which correlates well with human judgment. By applying DFU to posts crowd-annotated for toxicity, we found that polarized opinions are more likely by annotators originating from different countries. Also, we show that DFU can be exploited as an objective function to train models to predict whether a post will provoke polarized opinions in the future.

Distance from Unimodality: Assessing Polarization in Abusive Language

Hate speech detection faces two significant challenges: 1) the limited availability of labeled data and 2) the high variability of hate speech across different contexts and languages. Prompting brings a ray of hope to these challenges. It allows injecting a model with task-specific knowledge without relying on labeled data. 
This paper explores zero-shot learning with prompting for hate speech detection. We investigate how well zero-shot learning can detect hate speech in 3 languages with limited labeled data. We experiment with various large language models and verbalizers on 8 benchmark datasets. Our findings highlight the impact of prompt selection on the results. They also suggest that prompting, specifically with recent large language models, can achieve performance comparable to and surpass fine-tuned models, making it a promising alternative for under-resourced languages. 
Our findings highlight the potential of prompting for hate speech detection and show how both the prompt and the model have a significant impact on achieving more accurate predictions in this task.

Respectful or Toxic? Using Zero-Shot Learning with Language Models to Detect Hate Speech

We present an extensive evaluation of different fine-tuned models to detect instances of offensive and abusive language in Dutch across three benchmarks: a standard held-out test, a task- agnostic functional benchmark, and a dynamic test set. We also investigate the use of data cartography to identify high quality training data. Our results show a relatively good quality of the manually annotated data used to train the models while highlighting some critical weakness. We have also found a good portability of trained models along the same language phenomena. As for the data cartography, we have found a positive impact only on the functional benchmark and when selecting data per annotated dimension rather than using the entire training material.

Benchmarking Socially Unacceptable Language in Dutch

We draw from the framework of relationality as a pathway for modeling social relations to address gaps in text classification, generally, and offensive language classification, specifically. We use minoritized language, such as queer speech, to motivate a need for understanding and modeling social relations-- both among individuals and among their social communities. We then point to socio-ethical style as a research area for inferring and measuring social relations as well as propose additional questions to structure future research on operationalizing social context.



A Relational Approach to Offensive Speech: A Research Agenda

The prevalence of abusive language on different online platforms has been a major concern that raises the need for automated cross-platform abusive language detection. However, prior works focus on concatenating data from multiple platforms, inherently adopting Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) method. In this work, we address this challenge from the perspective of domain generalization objective. We design SCL-Fish, a supervised contrastive learning integrated meta-learning algorithm to detect abusive language on unseen platforms. Our experimental analysis shows that SCL-Fish achieves better performance over ERM and the existing state-of-the-art models. We also show that SCL-Fish is data-efficient and achieves comparable performance with the large-scale pre-trained models upon finetuning for the abusive language detection task.

Cross-Platform and Cross-Domain Abusive Language Detection with Supervised Contrastive Learning

While there has been increasing attention paid to the potential harms perpetuated by online platforms, most academic work on the subject centers on one narrow context: Western communities in primarily English language settings. Yet, social media platforms like YouTube support users globally and provide content in
several languages, including low-resourced languages. In this study, we investigate this context via a mixed methods approach: collecting and analysing search and recommendation data from YouTube in low-resource language settings and conducting semi-structured interviews with YouTube users who speak low-resourced languages in Ethiopia. Our early findings indicate the failure of current content moderation schemes for low-resource languages and the further infliction and distribution of harm to marginalized communities through recommendation systems.

Auditing YouTube Content Moderation in Low Resource Language Settings

We introduce ExtremeBB, a textual database of over 53.5M posts made by 38.5k users on 12 extremist bulletin board forums promoting online hate, harassment, the manosphere and other forms of extremism. It enables large-scale analyses of qualitative and quantitative historical trends going back two decades: measuring hate speech and toxicity; tracing the evolution of different strands of extremist ideology; tracking the relationships between online subcultures, extremist behaviours, and real-world violence; and monitoring extremist communities in near real time. This can shed light not only on the spread of problematic ideologies but also on the effectiveness of interventions. ExtremeBB comes with a robust ethical data-sharing regime that allows us to share data with academics worldwide. Since 2020, access has been granted to 49 licensees in 16 research groups from 12 institutions.

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DeTexD: A Benchmark Dataset for Delicate Text Detection

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