United States

Social platforms such as Gab and Parler, branded as `free-speech&#39; networks, have seen a significant growth of their user base in recent years. This popularity is mainly attributed to the stricter moderation enforced by mainstream platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit.
In this work we provide the first large scale analysis of hate-speech on Parler. We experiment with an array of algorithms for hate-speech detection, demonstrating the limitations of transfer learning in that domain, given the illusive and ever changing nature of the ways hate-speech is delivered. In order to improve classification accuracy we annotated 10K Parler posts, which we use to fine-tune a BERT classifier. Classification of individual posts is then leveraged for the classification of millions of users via label propagation over the social network. Classifying users by their propensity to disseminate hate, we find that hate mongers make about 16% of Parler active users, and that they have distinct characteristics comparing to other user groups. We find that hate mongers are more active, more central, express distinct levels of sentiment, and convey a distinct array of emotions like anger and sadness. 
We further complement our analysis by comparing the trends observed in Parler to those found in Gab. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first works to analyze hate speech in Parler in a quantitative manner and on the user level.

NAACL 2022

Free speech or Free Hate Speech? Analyzing the Proliferation of Hate Speech in Parler

parler

social platforms

hate speech

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Social platforms such as Gab and Parler, branded as `free-speech' networks, have seen a significant growth of their user base in recent years. This popularity is mainly attributed to the stricter moderation enforced by mainstream platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit.
In this work we provide the first large scale analysis of hate-speech on Parler. We experiment with an array of algorithms for hate-speech detection, demonstrating the limitations of transfer learning in that domain, given the illusive and ever changing nature of the ways hate-speech is delivered. In order to improve classification accuracy we annotated 10K Parler posts, which we use to fine-tune a BERT classifier. Classification of individual posts is then leveraged for the classification of millions of users via label propagation over the social network. Classifying users by their propensity to disseminate hate, we find that hate mongers make about 16% of Parler active users, and that they have distinct characteristics comparing to other user groups. We find that hate mongers are more active, more central, express distinct levels of sentiment, and convey a distinct array of emotions like anger and sadness. 
We further complement our analysis by comparing the trends observed in Parler to those found in Gab. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first works to analyze hate speech in Parler in a quantitative manner and on the user level.

workshop paper

Most of the published approaches and resources for offensive language and hate speech detection are tailored for the English language. In consequence, cross-lingual and cross-cultural perspectives lack some essential resources. The lack of diversity of the datasets in Spanish is notable. Variations throughout Spanish-speaking countries make existing datasets not enough to encompass the task in the different Spanish variants. We manually annotated 9834 tweets from Chile to enrich the existing Spanish resources with different words and new targets of hate that have not been considered in previous studies. We conducted several cross-dataset evaluation experiments of the models published in the literature using our Chilean dataset and two others in English and Spanish. 
We propose a comparative framework for quickly conducting comparative experiments using different previously published models. In addition, we set up a Codalab competition for further comparison of new models in a standard scenario, that is, data partitions and evaluation metrics.
All resources can be accessed through a centralized repository for researchers to get a complete picture of the progress on the multilingual hate speech and offensive language detection task.

Multilingual Resources for Offensive Language Detection

We present a new offensive language dataset (DeTox-dataset) containing 10,278 annotated German social media comments collected in the first half of 2021. With twelve different annotation categories annotated by six annotators, it is far more comprehensive than other datasets, and goes beyond just hate speech detection. The labels aim in particular also at toxicity, criminal relevance and discrimination types of comments. Furthermore, about half of the comments are from coherent parts of conversations, which opens the possibility to consider the comments contexts and do conversation analyses in order to research the contagion of offensive language in conversations.

DeTox: A Comprehensive Dataset for German Offensive Language and Conversation Analysis

Hate speech detection models are typically evaluated on held-out test sets. However, this risks painting an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of model performance because of increasingly well-documented systematic gaps and biases in hate speech datasets. To enable more targeted diagnostic insights, recent research has thus introduced functional tests for hate speech detection models. However, these tests currently only exist for English-language content, which means that they cannot support the development of more effective models in other languages spoken by billions across the world. To help address this issue, we introduce MULTILINGUAL HATECHECK (MHC), a suite of functional tests for multilingual hate speech detection models. MHC covers 34 functionalities across ten languages, which is more languages than any other hate speech dataset. To illustrate MHC’s utility, we train and test a high-performing multilingual hate speech detection model, and reveal critical model weaknesses for monolingual and cross-lingual applications.

Multilingual HateCheck: Functional Tests for Multilingual Hate Speech Detection Models

The subjectivity of recognizing hate speech makes it a complex task. This is also reflected by different and incomplete definitions in NLP. We present hate speech criteria, developed with perspectives from law and social science, with the aim of helping researchers create more precise definitions and annotation guidelines on five aspects: (1) target groups, (2) dominance, (3) perpetrator characteristics, (4) type of negative group reference, and the (5) type of potential consequences/effects. Definitions can be structured so that they cover a more broad or more narrow phenomenon. As such, conscious choices can be made on specifying criteria or leaving them open. We argue that the goal and exact task developers have in mind should determine how the scope of hate speech is defined. We provide an overview of the properties of English datasets from hatespeechdata.com that may help select the most suitable dataset for a specific scenario.

Hate Speech Criteria: A Modular Approach to Task-Specific Hate Speech Definitions

Tasks such as toxicity detection, hate speech detection, and online harassment detection have been developed for identifying interactions involving offensive speech. In this work, we articulate the need for a relational understanding of offensiveness to help distinguish denotative offensive speech from offensive speech serving as a mechanism through which marginalized communities resist oppressive social norms. Using examples from the queer community, we argue that evaluations of offensive speech must focus on the impacts of language use. We motivate this use of language in Cynic philosophy and use it to frame a use of offensive speech as a practice of resistance. We also explore the degree to which NLP systems may encounter limits to modeling relational context.

Accounting for Offensive Speech as a Practice of Resistance

Romania ranks almost last in Europe when it comes to gender equality in political representation, with about 10% fewer women in politics than the E.U. average. We proceed from the assumption that this underrepresentation is also influenced by the sexism and verbal abuse female politicians face in the public sphere, especially in online media. We propose a novel dataset with sexist comments in Romanian lan-
guage from online newspaper articles about Romanian female politicians and experiment with baseline models using classical machine learning models and finetuned pre-trained transformer models for the classification of sexist language in the online medium.

Users Hate Blondes: Detecting Sexism in User Comments on Online Romanian News

Online hate speech is a dangerous phenomenon that can (and should) be promptly counteracted properly. While Natural Language Processing has been successfully used for the purpose, many of the research efforts are directed toward the English language. This choice severely limits the classification power in non-English languages. In this paper, we test several learning frameworks for identifying hate speech in Italian text. We release HATE-ITA, a set of multi-language models trained on a large set of English data and available Italian datasets. HATE-ITA performs better than mono-lingual models and seems to adapt well also on language-specific slurs. We believe our findings will encourage research in other mid-to-low resource communities and provide a valuable benchmarking tool for the Italian community.

HATE-ITA: Hate Speech Detection in Italian Social Media Text

With the abundance of natural language processing (NLP) frameworks and toolkits being used in the clinical arena, a new challenge has arisen - how do technologists collaborate across several projects in an easy way? Private sector companies are usually not willing to share their work due to intellectual property rights and profit-bearing decisions. Therefore, the annotation schemes and toolkits that they use are rarely shared with the wider community. We present the clinical language pipeline toolkit (CLPT) and its corresponding annotation scheme called the CLAO (Clinical Language Annotation Object) with the aim of creating a way to share research results and other efforts through a software solution. The CLAO is a unified annotation scheme for clinical technology processing (CTP) projects that forms part of the CLPT and is more reliable than previous standards such as UIMA, BioC, and cTakes for annotation searches, insertions, and deletions. Additionally, it offers a standardized object that can be exchanged through an API that the authors release publicly for CTP project inclusion.

CLPT: A Universal Annotation Scheme and Toolkit for Clinical Language Processing

Automatically classifying electronic health records (EHRs) into diagnostic codes has been challenging for the NLP community. State-of-the-art methods treated this problem as a multi-label classification problem and proposed various architectures to model this problem. However, these systems did not leverage the superb performance of pretrained language models, which achieved superb performance on natural language understanding tasks. Prior work has shown that pretrained language models under-performed on this task with the regular fine-tuning scheme. Therefore, this paper aims at analyzing the causes of the underperformance and developing a framework for automatic ICD coding with pretrained language models. We spotted three main issues through the experiments: 1) large label space, 2) long input sequences, and 3) domain mismatch between pre-training and fine-tuning. We propose PLM-ICD, a framework that tackles the challenges with various strategies. The experimental results show that our proposed framework can overcome the challenges and achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of multiple metrics on the benchmark MIMIC data.


PLM-ICD: Automatic ICD Coding with Pretrained Language Models

Acronym disambiguation (AD) is the process of identifying the correct expansion of the acronyms in text. AD is crucial in natural language understanding of scientific and medical documents due to the high prevalence of technical acronyms and the possible expansions. Given that natural language is often ambiguous with more than one meaning for words, identifying the correct expansion for acronyms requires learning of effective representations for words, phrases, acronyms, and abbreviations based on their context. In this paper, we proposed an approach to leverage the triplet networks and triplet loss which learns better representations of text through distance comparisons of embeddings. We tested both the triplet network-based method and the modified triplet network-based method with m networks on the AD dataset from the SDU@AAAI-21 AD task, CASI dataset, and MeDAL dataset. F scores of 87.31%, 70.67%, and 75.75% were achieved by the m network-based approach for SDU, CASI, and MeDAL datasets respectively indicating that triplet network-based methods have comparable performance but with only 12% of the number of parameters in the baseline method. This effective implementation is available at https://github.com/sandaruSen/m_networksunder the MIT license.

Free speech or Free Hate Speech? Analyzing the Proliferation of Hate Speech in Parler

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