Challenges and frontiers in abusive content detection

Bertie Vidgen, Alex Harris, Dong Nguyen, Rebekah Tromble, Scott Hale, Helen Margetts


Abstract
Online abusive content detection is an inherently difficult task. It has received considerable attention from academia, particularly within the computational linguistics community, and performance appears to have improved as the field has matured. However, considerable challenges and unaddressed frontiers remain, spanning technical, social and ethical dimensions. These issues constrain the performance, efficiency and generalizability of abusive content detection systems. In this article we delineate and clarify the main challenges and frontiers in the field, critically evaluate their implications and discuss potential solutions. We also highlight ways in which social scientific insights can advance research. We discuss the lack of support given to researchers working with abusive content and provide guidelines for ethical research.
Anthology ID:
W19-3509
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Abusive Language Online
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Venue:
ALW
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
80–93
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3509
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-3509
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bertie Vidgen, Alex Harris, Dong Nguyen, Rebekah Tromble, Scott Hale, and Helen Margetts. 2019. Challenges and frontiers in abusive content detection. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Abusive Language Online, pages 80–93, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Challenges and frontiers in abusive content detection (Vidgen et al., ALW 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/W19-3509.pdf
Code
 bvidgen/Challenges-and-frontiers-in-abusive-content-detection
Data
On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities