Distributional properties of political dogwhistle representations in Swedish BERT

Niclas Hertzberg, Robin Cooper, Elina Lindgren, Björn Rönnerstrand, Gregor Rettenegger, Ellen Breitholtz, Asad Sayeed


Abstract
“Dogwhistles” are expressions intended by the speaker have two messages: a socially-unacceptable “in-group” message understood by a subset of listeners, and a benign message intended for the out-group. We take the result of a word-replacement survey of the Swedish population intended to reveal how dogwhistles are understood, and we show that the difficulty of annotating dogwhistles is reflected in the separability in the space of a sentence-transformer Swedish BERT trained on general data.
Anthology ID:
2022.woah-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, Washington (Hybrid)
Editors:
Kanika Narang, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Lambert Mathias, Bertie Vidgen, Zeerak Talat
Venue:
WOAH
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
170–175
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.woah-1.16
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.woah-1.16
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Niclas Hertzberg, Robin Cooper, Elina Lindgren, Björn Rönnerstrand, Gregor Rettenegger, Ellen Breitholtz, and Asad Sayeed. 2022. Distributional properties of political dogwhistle representations in Swedish BERT. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), pages 170–175, Seattle, Washington (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Distributional properties of political dogwhistle representations in Swedish BERT (Hertzberg et al., WOAH 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2022.woah-1.16.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2022.woah-1.16.mp4
Data
DogWhistle