Despite regulations imposed by nations and social media platforms, e.g. (Government of India, 2021; European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022), inter alia, hateful content persists as a significant challenge. Existing approaches primarily rely on reactive measures such as blocking or suspending offensive messages, with emerging strategies focusing on proactive measurements like detoxification and counterspeech. In our work, which we call HATEPRISM, we conduct a comprehensive examination of hate speech regulations and strategies from three perspectives: country regulations, social platform policies, and NLP research datasets. Our findings reveal significant inconsistencies in hate speech definitions and moderation practices across jurisdictions and platforms, alongside a lack of alignment with research efforts. Based on these insights, we suggest ideas and research direction for further exploration of a unified framework for automated hate speech moderation incorporating diverse strategies.

In this paper, we introduce CollEx, an innovative multimodal agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system designed to enhance interactive exploration of extensive scientific collections. Given the overwhelming volume and inherent complexity of scientific collections, conventional search systems often lack necessary intuitiveness and interactivity, presenting substantial barriers for learners, educators, and researchers. CollEx addresses these limitations by employing state-of-the-art Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) as multimodal agents accessible through an intuitive chat interface. By abstracting complex interactions via specialized agents equipped with advanced tools, CollEx facilitates curiosity-driven exploration, significantly simplifying access to diverse scientific collections and records therein. Our system integrates textual and visual modalities, supporting educational scenarios that are helpful for teachers, pupils, students, and researchers by fostering independent exploration as well as scientific excitement and curiosity. Furthermore, CollEx serves the research community by discovering interdisciplinary connections and complementing visual data. We illustrate the effectiveness of our system through a proof-of-concept application containing over 64,000 unique records across 32 collections from a local scientific collection from a public university.

This paper presents UHH’s approach developed for the AVeriTeC shared task. The goal of the challenge is to verify given real-world claims with evidences from the Web. In this shared task, we investigate a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model, which mainly contains retrieval, generation, and augmentation components. We start with the selection of the top 10k evidences via BM25 scores, and continue with two approaches to retrieve the most similar evidences: (1) to retrieve top 10 evidences through vector similarity, generate questions for them, and rerank them or (2) to generate questions for the claim and retrieve the most similar evidence, again, through vector similarity. After retrieving the top evidences, a Large Language Model (LLM) is prompted using the claim along with either all evidences or individual evidence to predict the label. Our system submission, UHH, using the first approach and individual evidence prompts, ranks 6th out of 23 systems.