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Large language models (LLMs) are fast becoming ubiquitous and have shown impressive performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Annotating data for downstream applications is a resource-intensive task in NLP. Recently, the use of LLMs as a cost-effective data annotator for annotating data used to train other models or as an assistive tool has been explored. Yet, little is known regarding the societal implications of using LLMs for data annotation. In this work, focusing on hate speech detection, we investigate how using LLMs such as GPT-4 and Llama-3 for hate speech detection can lead to different performances for different text dialects and racial bias in online hate detection classifiers. We used LLMs to predict hate speech in seven hate speech datasets and trained classifiers on the LLM annotations of each dataset. Using tweets written in African-American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE), we show that classifiers trained on LLM annotations assign tweets written in AAE to negative classes (e.g., hate, offensive, abuse, racism, etc.) at a higher rate than tweets written in SAE and that the classifiers have a higher false positive rate towards AAE tweets. We explore the effect of incorporating dialect priming in the prompting techniques used in prediction, showing that introducing dialect increases the rate at which AAE tweets are assigned to negative classes.
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FuzzE: Fuzzy Fairness Evaluation of Offensive Language Classifiers on African-American English
Hate speech and offensive language are rampant on social media. Machine learning has provided a way to moderate foul language at scale. However, much of the current research focuses on overall performance. Models may perform poorly on text written in a minority dialectal language. For instance, a hate speech classifier may produce more false positives on tweets written in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). To measure these problems, we need text written in both AAVE and Standard American English (SAE). Unfortunately, it is challenging to curate data for all linguistic styles in a timely manner—especially when we are constrained to specific problems, social media platforms, or by limited resources. In this paper, we answer the question, “How can we evaluate the performance of classifiers across minority dialectal languages when they are not present within a particular dataset?” Specifically, we propose an automated fairness fuzzing tool called FuzzE to quantify the fairness of text classifiers applied to AAVE text using a dataset that only contains text written in SAE. Overall, we find that the fairness estimates returned by our technique moderately correlates with the use of real ground-truth AAVE text. Warning: Offensive language is displayed in this manuscript.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1947697
- PAR ID:
- 10412932
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 01
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 881 to 889
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Detecting harmful content on social media, such as Twitter, is made difficult by the fact that the seemingly simple yes/no classification conceals a significant amount of complexity. Unfortunately, while several datasets have been collected for training classifiers in hate and offensive speech, there is a scarcity of datasets labeled with a finer granularity of target classes and specific targets. In this paper, we introduce THOS, a dataset of 8.3k tweets manually labeled with fine-grained annotations about the target of the message. We demonstrate that this dataset makes it feasible to train classifiers, based on Large Language Models, to perform classification at this level of granularity.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i01.5434
