With the spreading of hate speech on social media in recent years, automatic detection of hate speech is becoming a crucial task and has attracted attention from various communities. This task aims to recognize online posts (e.g., tweets) that contain hateful information. The peculiarities of languages in social media, such as short and poorly written content, lead to the difficulty of learning semantics and capturing discriminative features of hate speech. Previous studies have utilized additional useful resources, such as sentiment hashtags, to improve the performance of hate speech detection. Hashtags are added as input features serving either as sentiment-lexicons or extra context information. However, our close investigation shows that directly leveraging these features without considering their context may introduce noise to classifiers. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to leverage sentiment hashtags to enhance hate speech detection in a natural language inference framework. We design a novel framework SRIC that simultaneously performs two tasks: (1) semantic relation inference between online posts and sentiment hashtags, and (2) sentiment classification on these posts. The semantic relation inference aims to encourage the model to encode sentiment-indicative information into representations of online posts. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework compared with state-of-the-art representation learning models.
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The (moral) language of hate
Humans use language toward hateful ends, inciting violence and genocide, intimidating and denigrating others based on their identity. Despite efforts to better address the language of hate in the public sphere, the psychological processes involved in hateful language remain unclear. In this work, we hypothesize that morality and hate are concomitant in language. In a series of studies, we find evidence in support of this hypothesis using language from a diverse array of contexts, including the use of hateful language in propaganda to inspire genocide (Study 1), hateful slurs as they occur in large text corpora across a multitude of languages (Study 2), and hate speech on social-media platforms (Study 3). In post hoc analyses focusing on particular moral concerns, we found that the type of moral content invoked through hate speech varied by context, with Purity language prominent in hateful propaganda and online hate speech and Loyalty language invoked in hateful slurs across languages. Our findings provide a new psychological lens for understanding hateful language and points to further research into the intersection of morality and hate, with practical implications for mitigating hateful rhetoric online.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1846531
- PAR ID:
- 10430982
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PNAS Nexus
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 2752-6542
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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