Trigger Warnings: Bootstrapping a Violence Detector for Fan Fiction

Magdalena Wolska, Matti Wiegmann, Christopher Schröder, Ole Borchardt, Benno Stein, Martin Potthast


Abstract
We present the first dataset and evaluation results on a newly defined task: assigning trigger warnings. We introduce a labeled corpus of narrative fiction from Archive of Our Own (AO3), a popular fan fiction site, and define a document-level classification task to determine whether or not to assign a trigger warning to an English story. We focus on the most commonly assigned trigger type “violence’ using the warning labels provided by AO3 authors as ground-truth labels. We trained SVM, BERT, and Longfomer models on three datasets sampled from the corpus and achieve F1 scores between 0.8 and 0.9, indicating that assigning trigger warnings for violence is feasible.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.41
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
569–576
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.41
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.41
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Magdalena Wolska, Matti Wiegmann, Christopher Schröder, Ole Borchardt, Benno Stein, and Martin Potthast. 2023. Trigger Warnings: Bootstrapping a Violence Detector for Fan Fiction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 569–576, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Trigger Warnings: Bootstrapping a Violence Detector for Fan Fiction (Wolska et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.41.pdf