Can Language Model Moderators Improve the Health of Online Discourse?

Hyundong Cho, Shuai Liu, Taiwei Shi, Darpan Jain, Basem Rizk, Yuyang Huang, Zixun Lu, Nuan Wen, Jonathan Gratch, Emilio Ferrara, Jonathan May


Abstract
Conversational moderation of online communities is crucial to maintaining civility for a constructive environment, but it is challenging to scale and harmful to moderators. The inclusion of sophisticated natural language generation modules as a force multiplier to aid human moderators is a tantalizing prospect, but adequate evaluation approaches have so far been elusive. In this paper, we establish a systematic definition of conversational moderation effectiveness grounded on moderation literature and establish design criteria for conducting realistic yet safe evaluation. We then propose a comprehensive evaluation framework to assess models’ moderation capabilities independently of human intervention. With our framework, we conduct the first known study of language models as conversational moderators, finding that appropriately prompted models that incorporate insights from social science can provide specific and fair feedback on toxic behavior but struggle to influence users to increase their levels of respect and cooperation.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.415
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7471–7489
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.415
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hyundong Cho, Shuai Liu, Taiwei Shi, Darpan Jain, Basem Rizk, Yuyang Huang, Zixun Lu, Nuan Wen, Jonathan Gratch, Emilio Ferrara, and Jonathan May. 2024. Can Language Model Moderators Improve the Health of Online Discourse?. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7471–7489, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can Language Model Moderators Improve the Health of Online Discourse? (Cho et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.415.pdf
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 2024.naacl-long.415.copyright.pdf