AUTALIC: A Dataset for Anti-AUTistic Ableist Language In Context
Naba Rizvi, Harper Strickland, Daniel Gitelman, Alexis Morales Flores, Tristan Cooper, Aekta Kallepalli, Akshat Alurkar, Haaset Owens
Abstract
As our awareness of autism and ableism continues to increase, so does our understanding of ableist language towards autistic people. Such language poses a significant challenge in NLP research due to its subtle and context-dependent nature. Yet, detecting anti-autistic ableist language remains underexplored, with existing NLP tools often failing to capture its nuanced expressions. We present AUTALIC, the first dataset dedicated to the detection of anti-autistic ableist language in context, addressing a significant gap in the field. AUTALIC comprises 2,400 autism-related sentences collected from Reddit, accompanied by surrounding context, and annotated by trained experts with backgrounds in neurodiversity. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that current language models, including state-of-the-art LLMs, struggle to reliably identify anti-autistic ableism and diverge from human judgments, underscoring their limitations in this domain. We publicly release our dataset along with the individual annotations, providing an essential resource for developing more inclusive and context-aware NLP systems that better reflect diverse perspectives.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{rizvi-etal-2025-autalic,
title = "{AUTALIC}: A Dataset for Anti-{AUT}istic Ableist Language In Context",
author = "Rizvi, Naba and
Strickland, Harper and
Gitelman, Daniel and
Flores, Alexis Morales and
Cooper, Tristan and
Kallepalli, Aekta and
Alurkar, Akshat and
Owens, Haaset and
Ahmedi, Saleha and
Khirwadkar, Isha and
Munyaka, Imani N. S. and
Ousidhoum, Nedjma",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1022/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1022",
pages = "20999--21015",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}