Recently, social networks have become the primary means of communication for many people, leading computational linguistics researchers to focus on the language used on these platforms. As online interactions grow, recognizing and preventing offensive messages targeting various groups has become urgent. However, finding a balance between detecting hate speech and preserving free expression while promoting inclusive language is challenging. Previous studies have highlighted the risks of automated analysis misinterpreting context, which can lead to the censorship of marginalized groups. Our study is the first to explore the reappropriative use of slurs in Italian by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) witha zero-shot approach. We revised annotations of an existing Italian homotransphobic dataset, developed new guidelines, and designed various prompts to address the LLMs task. Our findings illustrate the difficulty of this challenge and provide preliminary results on using LLMs for such a language specific task.

In recent years, the Gender Based Violence (GBV) has become an important issue in modern society and a central topic in different research areas due to its alarming spread. Several Natural Language Processing (NLP) studies, concerning Hate Speech directed against women, have focused on slurs or incel communities. The main contribution of our work is the creation of the first dataset on social media comments to GBV, in particular to a femicide event. Our dataset, named GBV-Maltesi, contains 2,934 YouTube comments annotated following a new schema that we developed in order to study GBV and misogyny with an intersectional approach. During the experimental phase, we trained models on different corpora for binary misogyny detection and found that datasets that mostly include explicit expressions of misogyny are an easier challenge, compared to more implicit forms of misogyny contained in GVB-Maltesi.

Gender-fair language aims at promoting gender equality by using terms and expressions that include all identities and avoid reinforcing gender stereotypes. Implementing gender-fair strategies is particularly challenging in heavily gender-marked languages, such as Italian. To address this, the Gender-Fair Generation challenge intends to help shift toward gender-fair language in written communication. The challenge, designed to assess and monitor the recognition and generation of gender-fair language in both mono- and cross-lingual scenarios, includes three tasks: (1) the detection of gendered expressions in Italian sentences, (2) the reformulation of gendered expressions into gender-fair alternatives, and (3) the generation of gender-fair language in automatic translation from English to Italian. The challenge relies on three different annotated datasets: the GFL-it corpus, which contains Italian texts extracted from administrative documents provided by the University of Brescia; GeNTE, a bilingual test set for gender-neutral rewriting and translation built upon a subset of the Europarl dataset; and Neo-GATE, a bilingual test set designed to assess the use of non-binary neomorphemes in Italian for both fairformulation and translation tasks. Finally, each task is evaluated with specific metrics: average of F1-score obtained by means of BERTScore computed on each entry of the datasets for task 1, an accuracy measured with a gender-neutral classifier, and a coverage-weighted accuracy for tasks 2 and 3.

The teaching laboratory we have created integrates methodologies to address the topic of hate speech on social media among students while fostering computational thinking and AI education for societal impact. We provide a foundational understanding of hate speech and introduce computational concepts using matrices, bag of words, and practical exercises in platforms like Colaboratory. Additionally, we emphasize the application of AI, particularly in NLP, to address real-world challenges. Through retrospective evaluation, we assess the efficacy of our approach, aiming to empower students as proactive contributors to societal betterment. With this paper we present an overview of the laboratory’s structure, the primary materials used, and insights gleaned from six editions conducted to the present date.