Toxic, Hateful, Offensive or Abusive? What Are We Really Classifying? An Empirical Analysis of Hate Speech Datasets

Paula Fortuna, Juan Soler, Leo Wanner


Abstract
The field of the automatic detection of hate speech and related concepts has raised a lot of interest in the last years. Different datasets were annotated and classified by means of applying different machine learning algorithms. However, few efforts were done in order to clarify the applied categories and homogenize different datasets. Our study takes up this demand. We analyze six different publicly available datasets in this field with respect to their similarity and compatibility. We conduct two different experiments. First, we try to make the datasets compatible and represent the dataset classes as Fast Text word vectors analyzing the similarity between different classes in a intra and inter dataset manner. Second, we submit the chosen datasets to the Perspective API Toxicity classifier, achieving different performances depending on the categories and datasets. One of the main conclusions of these experiments is that many different definitions are being used for equivalent concepts, which makes most of the publicly available datasets incompatible. Grounded in our analysis, we provide guidelines for future dataset collection and annotation.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.838
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6786–6794
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.838
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paula Fortuna, Juan Soler, and Leo Wanner. 2020. Toxic, Hateful, Offensive or Abusive? What Are We Really Classifying? An Empirical Analysis of Hate Speech Datasets. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6786–6794, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Toxic, Hateful, Offensive or Abusive? What Are We Really Classifying? An Empirical Analysis of Hate Speech Datasets (Fortuna et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2020.lrec-1.838.pdf