Can NLP Tackle Hate Speech in the Real World? Stakeholder-Informed Feedback and Survey on Counterspeech

Tanvi Dinkar, Aiqi Jiang, Simona Frenda, Poppy Gerrard-Abbott, Nancie A. Gunson, Gavin Abercrombie, Ioannis Konstas


Abstract
Counterspeech, i.e. the practice of responding to online hate speech, has gained traction in NLP as a promising intervention. While early work emphasised collaboration with non-governmental organisation stakeholders, recent research trends have shifted toward automated pipelines that reuse a small set of legacy datasets, often without input from affected communities. This paper presents a systematic review of 74 NLP studies on counterspeech, analysing the extent to which stakeholder participation influences dataset creation, model development, and evaluation. To complement this analysis, we conducted a participatory case study that spanned close to two years with five NGOs specialising in online Gender-Based Violence (oGBV), identifying stakeholder-informed practices for counterspeech generation. Our findings reveal a growing disconnect between current NLP research and the needs of communities most impacted by toxic online content. We conclude with concrete recommendations for re-centring stakeholder expertise in counterspeech research.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.655
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
8276–8290
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.655/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tanvi Dinkar, Aiqi Jiang, Simona Frenda, Poppy Gerrard-Abbott, Nancie A. Gunson, Gavin Abercrombie, and Ioannis Konstas. 2026. Can NLP Tackle Hate Speech in the Real World? Stakeholder-Informed Feedback and Survey on Counterspeech. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:8276–8290.
Cite (Informal):
Can NLP Tackle Hate Speech in the Real World? Stakeholder-Informed Feedback and Survey on Counterspeech (Dinkar et al., LREC 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.655.pdf
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 2026.lrec-main.655.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.tsv