Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content. While prior works have focused on identifying hateful/offensive language, they are not adequate for meeting the challenges of content moderation since 1) moderation decisions are based on violation of rules, which subsumes detection of offensive speech, and 2) such rules often differ across communities which entails an adaptive solution. We propose to study the challenges of content moderation by introducing a multilingual dataset of 1.8 Million Reddit comments spanning 56 subreddits in English, German, Spanish and French1. We perform extensive experimental analysis to highlight the underlying challenges and suggest related research problems such as cross-lingual transfer, learning under label noise (human biases), transfer of moderation models, and predicting the violated rule. Our dataset and analysis can help better prepare for the challenges and opportunities of auto moderation.

Computing author intent from multimodal data like Instagram posts requires modeling a complex relationship between text and image. For example, a caption might evoke an ironic contrast with the image, so neither caption nor image is a mere transcript of the other. Instead they combine—via what has been called meaning multiplication (Bateman et al.)- to create a new meaning that has a more complex relation to the literal meanings of text and image. Here we introduce a multimodal dataset of 1299 Instagram posts labeled for three orthogonal taxonomies: the authorial intent behind the image-caption pair, the contextual relationship between the literal meanings of the image and caption, and the semiotic relationship between the signified meanings of the image and caption. We build a baseline deep multimodal classifier to validate the taxonomy, showing that employing both text and image improves intent detection by 9.6 compared to using only the image modality, demonstrating the commonality of non-intersective meaning multiplication. The gain with multimodality is greatest when the image and caption diverge semiotically. Our dataset offers a new resource for the study of the rich meanings that result from pairing text and image.

While models for Visual Question Answering (VQA) have steadily improved over the years, interacting with one quickly reveals that these models lack consistency. For instance, if a model answers “red” to “What color is the balloon?”, it might answer “no” if asked, “Is the balloon red?”. These responses violate simple notions of entailment and raise questions about how effectively VQA models ground language. In this work, we introduce a dataset, ConVQA, and metrics that enable quantitative evaluation of consistency in VQA. For a given observable fact in an image (e.g. the balloon’s color), we generate a set of logically consistent question-answer (QA) pairs (e.g. Is the balloon red?) and also collect a human-annotated set of common-sense based consistent QA pairs (e.g. Is the balloon the same color as tomato sauce?). Further, we propose a consistency-improving data augmentation module, a Consistency Teacher Module (CTM). CTM automatically generates entailed (or similar-intent) questions for a source QA pair and fine-tunes the VQA model if the VQA’s answer to the entailed question is consistent with the source QA pair. We demonstrate that our CTM-based training improves the consistency of VQA models on the Con-VQA datasets and is a strong baseline for further research.