Learning to Decipher Hate Symbols

Jing Qian, Mai ElSherief, Elizabeth Belding, William Yang Wang


Abstract
Existing computational models to understand hate speech typically frame the problem as a simple classification task, bypassing the understanding of hate symbols (e.g., 14 words, kigy) and their secret connotations. In this paper, we propose a novel task of deciphering hate symbols. To do this, we leveraged the Urban Dictionary and collected a new, symbol-rich Twitter corpus of hate speech. We investigate neural network latent context models for deciphering hate symbols. More specifically, we study Sequence-to-Sequence models and show how they are able to crack the ciphers based on context. Furthermore, we propose a novel Variational Decipher and show how it can generalize better to unseen hate symbols in a more challenging testing setting.
Anthology ID:
N19-1305
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3006–3015
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1305
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1305
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jing Qian, Mai ElSherief, Elizabeth Belding, and William Yang Wang. 2019. Learning to Decipher Hate Symbols. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3006–3015, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Decipher Hate Symbols (Qian et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/N19-1305.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/359687876