Making FETCH! Happen: Finding Emergent Dog Whistles Through Common Habitats
Kuleen Sasse, Carlos Alejandro Aguirre, Isabel Cachola, Sharon Levy, Mark Dredze
Abstract
Dog whistles are coded expressions with dual meanings: one intended for the general public (outgroup) and another that conveys a specific message to an intended audience (ingroup). Often, these expressions are used to convey controversial political opinions while maintaining plausible deniability and slip by content moderation filters. Identification of dog whistles relies on curated lexicons, which have trouble keeping up to date. We introduce FETCH!, a task for finding novel dog whistles in massive social media corpora. We find that state-of-the-art systems fail to achieve meaningful results across three distinct social media case studies. We present EarShot, a strong baseline system that combines the strengths of vector databases and Large Language Models (LLMs) to efficiently and effectively identify new dog whistles.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{sasse-etal-2025-making,
title = "Making {FETCH}! Happen: Finding Emergent Dog Whistles Through Common Habitats",
author = "Sasse, Kuleen and
Aguirre, Carlos Alejandro and
Cachola, Isabel and
Levy, Sharon and
Dredze, Mark",
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.284/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.284",
pages = "5687--5709",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}