DefVerify: Do Hate Speech Models Reflect Their Dataset’s Definition?

Urja Khurana, Eric Nalisnick, Antske Fokkens


Abstract
When building a predictive model, it is often difficult to ensure that application-specific requirements are encoded by the model that will eventually be deployed. Consider researchers working on hate speech detection. They will have an idea of what is considered hate speech, but building a model that reflects their view accurately requires preserving those ideals throughout the workflow of data set construction and model training. Complications such as sampling bias, annotation bias, and model misspecification almost always arise, possibly resulting in a gap between the application specification and the model’s actual behavior upon deployment. To address this issue for hate speech detection, we propose DefVerify: a 3-step procedure that (i) encodes a user-specified definition of hate speech, (ii) quantifies to what extent the model reflects the intended definition, and (iii) tries to identify the point of failure in the workflow. We use DefVerify to find gaps between definition and model behavior when applied to six popular hate speech benchmark datasets.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.293
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4341–4358
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.293/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Urja Khurana, Eric Nalisnick, and Antske Fokkens. 2025. DefVerify: Do Hate Speech Models Reflect Their Dataset’s Definition?. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4341–4358, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DefVerify: Do Hate Speech Models Reflect Their Dataset’s Definition? (Khurana et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.293.pdf