Beyond Binary: Towards Embracing Complexities in Cyberbullying Detection and Intervention - a Position Paper

Kanishk Verma, Kolawole John Adebayo, Joachim Wagner, Megan Reynolds, Rebecca Umbach, Tijana Milosevic, Brian Davis


Abstract
In the digital age, cyberbullying (CB) poses a significant concern, impacting individuals as early as primary school and leading to severe or lasting consequences, including an increased risk of self-harm. CB incidents, are not limited to bullies and victims, but include bystanders with various roles, and usually have numerous sub-categories and variations of online harms. This position paper emphasises the complexity of CB incidents by drawing on insights from psychology, social sciences, and computational linguistics. While awareness of CB complexities is growing, existing computational techniques tend to oversimplify CB as a binary classification task, often relying on training datasets that capture peripheries of CB behaviours. Inconsistent definitions and categories of CB-related online harms across various platforms further complicates the issue. Ethical concerns arise when CB research involves children to role-play CB incidents to curate datasets. Through multi-disciplinary collaboration, we propose strategies for consideration when developing CB detection systems. We present our position on leveraging large language models (LLMs) such as Claude-2 and Llama2-Chat as an alternative approach to generate CB-related role-playing datasets. Our goal is to assist researchers, policymakers, and online platforms in making informed decisions regarding the automation of CB incident detection and intervention. By addressing these complexities, our research contributes to a more nuanced and effective approach to combating CB especially in young people.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.203
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2264–2284
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.203
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kanishk Verma, Kolawole John Adebayo, Joachim Wagner, Megan Reynolds, Rebecca Umbach, Tijana Milosevic, and Brian Davis. 2024. Beyond Binary: Towards Embracing Complexities in Cyberbullying Detection and Intervention - a Position Paper. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2264–2284, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Binary: Towards Embracing Complexities in Cyberbullying Detection and Intervention - a Position Paper (Verma et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.203.pdf