We introduce the Measuring Hate Speech corpus, a dataset created to measure hate speech while adjusting for annotators’ perspectives. It consists of 50,070 social media comments spanning YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, labeled by 11,143 annotators recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each observation includes 10 ordinal labels: sentiment, disrespect, insult, attacking/defending, humiliation, inferior/superior status, dehumanization, violence, genocide, and a 3-valued hate speech benchmark label. The labels are aggregated using faceted Rasch measurement theory (RMT) into a continuous score that measures each comment’s location on a hate speech spectrum. The annotation experimental design assigned comments to multiple annotators in order to yield a linked network, allowing annotator disagreement (perspective) to be statistically summarized. Annotators’ labeling strictness was estimated during the RMT scaling, projecting their perspective onto a linear measure that was adjusted for the hate speech score. Models that incorporate this annotator perspective parameter as an auxiliary input can generate label- and score-level predictions conditional on annotator perspective. The corpus includes the identity group targets of each comment (8 groups, 42 subgroups) and annotator demographics (6 groups, 40 subgroups), facilitating analyses of interactions between annotator- and comment-level identities, i.e. identity-related annotator perspective.

Textual data in ancient and historical languages such as Latin is increasingly available in machine readable forms, yet computational tools to analyze and process this data are still lacking. We describe our system for part-of-speech tagging in Latin, an entry in the EvaLatin 2020 shared task. Based on a detailed analysis of the training data, we make targeted preprocessing decisions and design our model. We leverage existing large unlabelled resources to pre-train representations at both the grapheme and word level, which serve as the inputs to our LSTM-based models. We perform an extensive cross-validated hyperparameter search, achieving an accuracy score of up to 93 on in-domain texts. We publicly release all our code and trained models in the hope that our system will be of use to social scientists and digital humanists alike. The insights we draw from our inital analysis can also inform future NLP work modeling syntactic information in Latin.

Learning universal sentence representations which accurately model sentential semantic content is a current goal of natural language processing research. A prominent and successful approach is to train recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to encode sentences into fixed length vectors. Many core linguistic phenomena that one would like to model in universal sentence representations depend on syntactic structure. Despite the fact that RNNs do not have explicit syntactic structural representations, there is some evidence that RNNs can approximate such structure-dependent phenomena under certain conditions, in addition to their widespread success in practical tasks. In this work, we assess RNNs’ ability to learn the structure-dependent phenomenon of main clause tense.