Ruddit: Norms of Offensiveness for English Reddit Comments

Rishav Hada, Sohi Sudhir, Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis, Saif M. Mohammad, Ekaterina Shutova


Abstract
On social media platforms, hateful and offensive language negatively impact the mental well-being of users and the participation of people from diverse backgrounds. Automatic methods to detect offensive language have largely relied on datasets with categorical labels. However, comments can vary in their degree of offensiveness. We create the first dataset of English language Reddit comments that has fine-grained, real-valued scores between -1 (maximally supportive) and 1 (maximally offensive). The dataset was annotated using Best–Worst Scaling, a form of comparative annotation that has been shown to alleviate known biases of using rating scales. We show that the method produces highly reliable offensiveness scores. Finally, we evaluate the ability of widely-used neural models to predict offensiveness scores on this new dataset.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.210
Original:
2021.acl-long.210v1
Version 2:
2021.acl-long.210v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2700–2717
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.210
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.210
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rishav Hada, Sohi Sudhir, Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis, Saif M. Mohammad, and Ekaterina Shutova. 2021. Ruddit: Norms of Offensiveness for English Reddit Comments. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2700–2717, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Ruddit: Norms of Offensiveness for English Reddit Comments (Hada et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2021.acl-long.210.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2021.acl-long.210.mp4
Code
 hadarishav/Ruddit
Data
RudditPushshift Reddit