Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media

Marcos Zampieri, Shervin Malmasi, Preslav Nakov, Sara Rosenthal, Noura Farra, Ritesh Kumar

Abstract
As offensive content has become pervasive in social media, there has been much research in identifying potentially offensive messages. However, previous work on this topic did not consider the problem as a whole, but rather focused on detecting very specific types of offensive content, e.g., hate speech, cyberbulling, or cyber-aggression. In contrast, here we target several different kinds of offensive content. In particular, we model the task hierarchically, identifying the type and the target of offensive messages in social media. For this purpose, we complied the Offensive Language Identification Dataset (OLID), a new dataset with tweets annotated for offensive content using a fine-grained three-layer annotation scheme, which we make publicly available. We discuss the main similarities and differences between OLID and pre-existing datasets for hate speech identification, aggression detection, and similar tasks. We further experiment with and we compare the performance of different machine learning models on OLID.
Anthology ID:
N19-1144
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:
1415–1420
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1144
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1144
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marcos Zampieri, Shervin Malmasi, Preslav Nakov, Sara Rosenthal, Noura Farra, and Ritesh Kumar. 2019. Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media. 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 1415–1420, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media (Zampieri et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-bitext-workshop/N19-1144.pdf
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