Multilingual Content Moderation: A Case Study on Reddit

Meng Ye, Karan Sikka, Katherine Atwell, Sabit Hassan, Ajay Divakaran, Malihe Alikhani


Abstract
Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content. While prior works have focused on identifying hateful/offensive language, they are not adequate for meeting the challenges of content moderation since 1) moderation decisions are based on violation of rules, which subsumes detection of offensive speech, and 2) such rules often differ across communities which entails an adaptive solution. We propose to study the challenges of content moderation by introducing a multilingual dataset of 1.8 Million Reddit comments spanning 56 subreddits in English, German, Spanish and French1. We perform extensive experimental analysis to highlight the underlying challenges and suggest related research problems such as cross-lingual transfer, learning under label noise (human biases), transfer of moderation models, and predicting the violated rule. Our dataset and analysis can help better prepare for the challenges and opportunities of auto moderation.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.276
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3828–3844
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.276
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.276
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Meng Ye, Karan Sikka, Katherine Atwell, Sabit Hassan, Ajay Divakaran, and Malihe Alikhani. 2023. Multilingual Content Moderation: A Case Study on Reddit. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3828–3844, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual Content Moderation: A Case Study on Reddit (Ye et al., EACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.276.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.276.mp4