A Community-Centric Perspective for Characterizing and Detecting Anti-Asian Violence-Provoking Speech

Gaurav Verma, Rynaa Grover, Jiawei Zhou, Binny Mathew, Jordan Kraemer, Munmun Choudhury, Srijan Kumar


Abstract
Violence-provoking speech – speech that implicitly or explicitly promotes violence against the members of the targeted community, contributed to a massive surge in anti-Asian crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. While previous works have characterized and built tools for detecting other forms of harmful speech, like fear speech and hate speech, our work takes a community-centric approach to studying anti-Asian violence-provoking speech. Using data from ~420k Twitter posts spanning a 3-year duration (January 1, 2020 to February 1, 2023), we develop a codebook to characterize anti-Asian violence-provoking speech and collect a community-crowdsourced dataset to facilitate its large-scale detection using state-of-the-art classifiers. We contrast the capabilities of natural language processing classifiers, ranging from BERT-based to LLM-based classifiers, in detecting violence-provoking speech with their capabilities to detect anti-Asian hateful speech. In contrast to prior work that has demonstrated the effectiveness of such classifiers in detecting hateful speech (F1 = 0.89), our work shows that accurate and reliable detection of violence-provoking speech is a challenging task (F1 = 0.69). We discuss the implications of our findings, particularly the need for proactive interventions to support Asian communities during public health crises.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.684
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12672–12684
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.684
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.684
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gaurav Verma, Rynaa Grover, Jiawei Zhou, Binny Mathew, Jordan Kraemer, Munmun Choudhury, and Srijan Kumar. 2024. A Community-Centric Perspective for Characterizing and Detecting Anti-Asian Violence-Provoking Speech. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12672–12684, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Community-Centric Perspective for Characterizing and Detecting Anti-Asian Violence-Provoking Speech (Verma et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.684.pdf