Towards Detecting Lexical Change of Hate Speech in Historical Data

Sanne Hoeken, Sophie Spliethoff, Silke Schwandt, Sina Zarrieß, Özge Alacam


Abstract
The investigation of lexical change has predominantly focused on generic language evolution, not suited for detecting shifts in a particular domain, such as hate speech. Our study introduces the task of identifying changes in lexical semantics related to hate speech within historical texts. We present an interdisciplinary approach that brings together NLP and History, yielding a pilot dataset comprising 16th-century Early Modern English religious writings during the Protestant Reformation. We provide annotations for both semantic shifts and hatefulness on this data and, thereby, combine the tasks of Lexical Semantic Change Detection and Hate Speech Detection. Our framework and resulting dataset facilitate the evaluation of our applied methods, advancing the analysis of hate speech evolution.
Anthology ID:
2023.lchange-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Syrielle Montariol, Haim Dubossarsky, Andrey Kutuzov, Simon Hengchen, David Alfter, Francesco Periti, Pierluigi Cassotti
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
100–111
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.lchange-1.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.lchange-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sanne Hoeken, Sophie Spliethoff, Silke Schwandt, Sina Zarrieß, and Özge Alacam. 2023. Towards Detecting Lexical Change of Hate Speech in Historical Data. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 100–111, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Detecting Lexical Change of Hate Speech in Historical Data (Hoeken et al., LChange 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.lchange-1.11.pdf