Monitoring Targeted Hate in Online Environments

Hateful comments, swearwords and sometimes even death threats are becoming a reality for many people today in online environments. This is especially true for journalists, politicians, artists, and other public figures. This paper describes how hate directed towards individuals can be measured in online environments using a simple dictionary-based approach. We present a case study on Swedish politicians, and use examples from this study to discuss shortcomings of the proposed dictionary-based approach. We also outline possibilities for potential refinements of the proposed approach.

[1]  Paul Rozin,et al.  FROM PLATO TO PUTNAM: FOUR WAYS TO THINK ABOUT HATE , 2008 .

[2]  Claire Cardie,et al.  Adapting a Polarity Lexicon using Integer Linear Programming for Domain-Specific Sentiment Classification , 2009, EMNLP.

[3]  Erik Velldal,et al.  Threat detection in online discussions , 2016, WASSA@NAACL-HLT.

[4]  Walter Daelemans,et al.  The Automated Detection of Racist Discourse in Dutch Social Media , 2016 .

[5]  B. Gardiner,et al.  The dark side of Guardian comments , 2016 .

[6]  Walter Daelemans,et al.  A Dictionary-based Approach to Racism Detection in Dutch Social Media , 2016, ArXiv.

[7]  Jeffrey Dean,et al.  Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality , 2013, NIPS.

[8]  Robert J. Sternberg,et al.  The nature of hate , 2008 .

[9]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  Detecting Hate Speech on the World Wide Web , 2012 .

[10]  Dirk Hovy,et al.  Hateful Symbols or Hateful People? Predictive Features for Hate Speech Detection on Twitter , 2016, NAACL.

[11]  Ingmar Weber,et al.  Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language , 2017, ICWSM.

[12]  Björn Gambäck,et al.  Negation Scope Detection for Twitter Sentiment Analysis , 2015, WASSA@EMNLP.

[13]  Björn Ross,et al.  Measuring the Reliability of Hate Speech Annotations: The Case of the European Refugee Crisis , 2016, ArXiv.

[14]  Mikolaj Winiewski,et al.  Exposure to hate speech increases prejudice through desensitization , 2018, Aggressive behavior.

[15]  G. Āllport.  The Nature of Prejudice , 1954 .

[16]  Ting Liu,et al.  Negation Scope Detection with Recurrent Neural Networks Models in Review Texts , 2016, ICYCSEE.

[17]  Magnus Sahlgren,et al.  Distributional Term Set Expansion , 2018, LREC.

[18]  Jolanda Jetten,et al.  Not “just words”: Exposure to homophobic epithets leads to dehumanizing and physical distancing from gay men , 2016 .

[19]  Petr Sojka,et al.  Software Framework for Topic Modelling with Large Corpora , 2010 .

[20]  Jesse Graham,et al.  Dehumanization increases instrumental violence, but not moral violence , 2017, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[21]  Jacob Eisenstein,et al.  Unsupervised Learning for Lexicon-Based Classification , 2016, AAAI.