Hate and Toxic Speech Detection in the Context of Covid-19 Pandemic using XAI: Ongoing Applied Research

David Hardage, Peyman Najafirad


Abstract
As social distancing, self-quarantines, and travel restrictions have shifted a lot of pandemic conversations to social media so does the spread of hate speech. While recent machine learning solutions for automated hate and offensive speech identification are available on Twitter, there are issues with their interpretability. We propose a novel use of learned feature importance which improves upon the performance of prior state-of-the-art text classification techniques, while producing more easily interpretable decisions. We also discuss both technical and practical challenges that remain for this task.
Anthology ID:
2020.nlpcovid19-2.36
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Karin Verspoor, Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, Michael Conway, Berry de Bruijn, Mark Dredze, Rada Mihalcea, Byron Wallace
Venue:
NLP-COVID19
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcovid19-2.36
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.nlpcovid19-2.36
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Hardage and Peyman Najafirad. 2020. Hate and Toxic Speech Detection in the Context of Covid-19 Pandemic using XAI: Ongoing Applied Research. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hate and Toxic Speech Detection in the Context of Covid-19 Pandemic using XAI: Ongoing Applied Research (Hardage & Najafirad, NLP-COVID19 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.nlpcovid19-2.36.pdf