SemEval-2020 Task 12: Multilingual Offensive Language Identification in Social Media (OffensEval 2020)

We present the results and main findings of SemEval-2020 Task 12 on Multilingual Offensive Language Identification in Social Media (OffensEval 2020). The task involves three subtasks corresponding to the hierarchical taxonomy of the OLID schema (Zampieri et al., 2019a) from OffensEval 2019. The task featured five languages: English, Arabic, Danish, Greek, and Turkish for Subtask A. In addition, English also featured Subtasks B and C. OffensEval 2020 was one of the most popular tasks at SemEval-2020 attracting a large number of participants across all subtasks and also across all languages. A total of 528 teams signed up to participate in the task, 145 teams submitted systems during the evaluation period, and 70 submitted system description papers.Comment: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2020

Towards Automated Moderation: Enabling Toxic Language Detection with Transfer Learning and Attention-Based Models

Our world is more connected than ever before. Sadly, however, this highly connected world has made it easier to bully, insult, and propagate hate speech on the cyberspace. Even though researchers and companies alike have started investigating this real-world problem, the question remains as to why users are increasingly being exposed to hate and discrimination online. In fact, the noticeable and persistent increase in harmful language on social media platforms indicates that the situation is, actually, only getting worse. Hence, in this work, we show that contemporary ML methods can help tackle this challenge in an accurate and cost-effective manner. Our experiments demonstrate that a universal approach combining transfer learning methods and state-of-the-art Transformer architectures can trigger the efficient development of toxic language detection models. Consequently, with this universal approach, we provide platform providers with a simplistic approach capable of enabling the automated moderation of user-generated content, and as a result, hope to contribute to making the web a safer place

Detecting Abusive Language on Online Platforms: A Critical Analysis

Abusive language on online platforms is a major societal problem, often leading to important societal problems such as the marginalisation of underrepresented minorities. There are many different forms of abusive language such as hate speech, profanity, and cyber-bullying, and online platforms seek to moderate it in order to limit societal harm, to comply with legislation, and to create a more inclusive environment for their users. Within the field of Natural Language Processing, researchers have developed different methods for automatically detecting abusive language, often focusing on specific subproblems or on narrow communities, as what is considered abusive language very much differs by context. We argue that there is currently a dichotomy between what types of abusive language online platforms seek to curb, and what research efforts there are to automatically detect abusive language. We thus survey existing methods as well as content moderation policies by online platforms in this light, and we suggest directions for future work