Uses of pejorative expressions can be benign or actively empowering. When models for abuse detection misclassify these expressions as derogatory, they inadvertently censor productive conversations held by marginalized groups. One way to engage with non-dominant perspectives is to add context around conversations. Previous research has leveraged user- and thread-level features, but it often neglects the spaces within which productive conversations take place. Our paper highlights how community context can improve classification outcomes in abusive language detection. We make two main contributions to this end. First, we demonstrate that online communities cluster by the nature of their support towards victims of abuse. Second, we establish how community context improves accuracy and reduces the false positive rates of state-of-the-art abusive language classifiers. These findings suggest a promising direction for context-aware models in abusive language research.

Abusive language classifiers have been shown to exhibit bias against women and racial minorities. Since these models are trained on data that is collected using keywords, they tend to exhibit a high sensitivity towards pejoratives. As a result, comments written by victims of abuse are frequently labelled as hateful, even if they discuss or reclaim slurs. Any attempt to address bias in keyword-based corpora requires a better understanding of pejorative language, as well as an equitable representation of targeted users in data collection. We make two main contributions to this end. First, we provide an annotation guide that outlines 4 main categories of online slur usage, which we further divide into a total of 12 sub-categories. Second, we present a publicly available corpus based on our taxonomy, with 39.8k human annotated comments extracted from Reddit. This corpus was annotated by a diverse cohort of coders, with Shannon equitability indices of 0.90, 0.92, and 0.87 across sexuality, ethnicity, and gender. Taken together, our taxonomy and corpus allow researchers to evaluate classifiers on a wider range of speech containing slurs.

A study of conversations on Twitter found that some arguments between strangers led to favorable change in discourse and even in attitudes. The authors propose that such exchanges can be usefully distinguished according to whether individuals or groups take part on each side, since the opportunity for a constructive exchange of views seems to vary accordingly.