Implicitly Abusive Language – What does it actually look like and why are we not getting there?

Michael Wiegand; Josef Ruppenhofer; Elisabeth Eder

NAACL 2021long79 citations

Implicitly Abusive Language – What does it actually look like and why are we not getting there?

Michael Wiegand, Josef Ruppenhofer, Elisabeth Eder

Abstract

Abusive language detection is an emerging field in natural language processing which has received a large amount of attention recently. Still the success of automatic detection is limited. Particularly, the detection of implicitly abusive language, i.e. abusive language that is not conveyed by abusive words (e.g. dumbass or scum), is not working well. In this position paper, we explain why existing datasets make learning implicit abuse difficult and what needs to be changed in the design of such datasets. Arguing for a divide-and-conquer strategy, we present a list of subtypes of implicitly abusive language and formulate research tasks and questions for future research.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{wiegand-etal-2021-implicitly-abusive,
    title = "Implicitly Abusive Language {--} What does it actually look like and why are we not getting there?",
    author = "Wiegand, Michael  and
      Ruppenhofer, Josef  and
      Eder, Elisabeth",
    editor = "Toutanova, Kristina  and
      Rumshisky, Anna  and
      Zettlemoyer, Luke  and
      Hakkani-Tur, Dilek  and
      Beltagy, Iz  and
      Bethard, Steven  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Zhou, Yichao",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
    month = jun,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.48/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.48",
    pages = "576--587"
}