Stephen Rains


2019

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Incivility Detection in Online Comments
Farig Sadeque | Stephen Rains | Yotam Shmargad | Kate Kenski | Kevin Coe | Steven Bethard
Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019)

Incivility in public discourse has been a major concern in recent times as it can affect the quality and tenacity of the discourse negatively. In this paper, we present neural models that can learn to detect name-calling and vulgarity from a newspaper comment section. We show that in contrast to prior work on detecting toxic language, fine-grained incivilities like namecalling cannot be accurately detected by simple models like logistic regression. We apply the models trained on the newspaper comments data to detect uncivil comments in a Russian troll dataset, and find that despite the change of domain, the model makes accurate predictions.