A Legal Approach to Hate Speech – Operationalizing the EU’s Legal Framework against the Expression of Hatred as an NLP Task

Frederike Zufall, Marius Hamacher, Katharina Kloppenborg, Torsten Zesch


Abstract
We propose a ‘legal approach’ to hate speech detection by operationalization of the decision as to whether a post is subject to criminal law into an NLP task. Comparing existing regulatory regimes for hate speech, we base our investigation on the European Union’s framework as it provides a widely applicable legal minimum standard. Accurately deciding whether a post is punishable or not usually requires legal education. We show that, by breaking the legal assessment down into a series of simpler sub-decisions, even laypersons can annotate consistently. Based on a newly annotated dataset, our experiments show that directly learning an automated model of punishable content is challenging. However, learning the two sub-tasks of ‘target group’ and ‘targeting conduct’ instead of a holistic, end-to-end approach to the legal assessment yields better results. Overall, our method also provides decisions that are more transparent than those of end-to-end models, which is a crucial point in legal decision-making.
Anthology ID:
2022.nllp-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Nikolaos Aletras, Ilias Chalkidis, Leslie Barrett, Cătălina Goanță, Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro
Venue:
NLLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
53–64
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.5
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.nllp-1.5
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Frederike Zufall, Marius Hamacher, Katharina Kloppenborg, and Torsten Zesch. 2022. A Legal Approach to Hate Speech – Operationalizing the EU’s Legal Framework against the Expression of Hatred as an NLP Task. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022, pages 53–64, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Legal Approach to Hate Speech – Operationalizing the EU’s Legal Framework against the Expression of Hatred as an NLP Task (Zufall et al., NLLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.5.pdf