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.

Recently, influence functions present an apparatus for achieving explainability for deep neural models by quantifying the perturbation of individual train instances that might impact a test prediction. Our objectives in this paper are twofold. First we incorporate influence functions as a feedback into the model to improve its performance. Second, in a dataset extension exercise, using influence functions to automatically identify data points that have been initially ‘silver’ annotated by some existing method and need to be cross-checked (and corrected) by annotators to improve the model performance. To meet these objectives, in this paper, we introduce InfFeed, which uses influence functions to compute the influential instances for a target instance. Toward the first objective, we adjust the label of the target instance based on its influencer(s) label. In doing this, InfFeed outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines (including LLMs) by a maximum macro F1-score margin of almost 4% for hate speech classification, 3.5% for stance classification, and 3% for irony and 2% for sarcasm detection. Toward the second objective we show that manually re-annotating only those silver annotated data points in the extension set that have a negative influence can immensely improve the model performance bringing it very close to the scenario where all the data points in the extension set have gold labels. This allows for huge reduction of the number of data points that need to be manually annotated since out of the silver annotated extension dataset, the influence function scheme picks up ~1/1000 points that need manual correction.

Due to the sheer volume of online hate, the AI and NLP communities have started building models to detect such hateful content. Recently, multilingual hate is a major emerging challenge for automated detection where code-mixing or more than one language have been used for conversation in social media. Typically, hate speech detection models are evaluated by measuring their performance on the held-out test data using metrics such as accuracy and F1-score. While these metrics are useful, it becomes difficult to identify using them where the model is failing, and how to resolve it. To enable more targeted diagnostic insights of such multilingual hate speech models, we introduce a set of functionalities for the purpose of evaluation. We have been inspired to design this kind of functionalities based on real-world conversation on social media. Considering Hindi as a base language, we craft test cases for each functionality. We name our evaluation dataset HateCheckHIn. To illustrate the utility of these functionalities , we test state-of-the-art transformer based m-BERT model and the Perspective API.

Word senses are not static and may have temporal, spatial or corpus-specific scopes. Identifying such scopes might benefit the existing WSD systems largely. In this paper, while studying corpus specific word senses, we adapt three existing predominant and novel-sense discovery algorithms to identify these corpus-specific senses. We make use of text data available in the form of millions of digitized books and newspaper archives as two different sources of corpora and propose automated methods to identify corpus-specific word senses at various time points. We conduct an extensive and thorough human judgement experiment to rigorously evaluate and compare the performance of these approaches. Post adaptation, the output of the three algorithms are in the same format and the accuracy results are also comparable, with roughly 45-60% of the reported corpus-specific senses being judged as genuine.