Tools and Resources for Detecting Hate and Prejudice against Immigrants in Social Media
Cristina Bosco, Viviana Patti, Marcello Bogetti, Michelangelo Conoscenti, Giancarlo Ruffo, Rossano Schifanella, Marco Antonio Stranisci · Institutional Research Information System University of Turin (University of Turin) · 2017
Abstr act.This position paper describes the early stages of an on going project for the development of artificial intelligence tools and resources to detect and analyzehate speech and prejudice against immigrants: IHATEPREJUDICE 3 .It istheresult of amulti-disciplinary team that includes skills from computational linguistics and sentiment analysis, to social network analysis and visualization.The approach follows a holistic and multi-lingual perspective, which encompasses different knowledge sources to be meaningfully aggregated.Thus, although the project is currently mainly focussed on a local case-study (Piedmont, a region of Italy), it is scalable over larger territories and different languages which can be considered as representative, namely the European Union.Since this is quite an innovative approach to the problem, this position paper aims at reaching out colleagues with a potential interest in this area and/or to solicitate feedback by those who are in the early stages of their projects and wish to share their experience or join efforts. I NTRODUCTI ONNearly a quarter of a billion people, throughout the world, currently live in a country other than their place of birth.This is an increase of 41% from 2000 to 2015.This figure includes more than 21 million refugees -often vulnerable and dissatisfied.Since 2015 Europe is facing an unprecedented refugee crisis, the by-effect of the Syrian civil war and the terrible living conditions in equatorial Africa.A 1,300,000 people have generated this increased migration flow to Europe which can only but increase, putting European stable societies, so far, under pressure.Therefore, the implications for the European society and the way we behave towards immigration, immigrant integration and social inclusion for newcomers and their children, are becoming more decisive and must be addressed either at a local or global level, considering a political and social perspective.While this phenomenon stimulates the generation and diffusion of hate speech and hate crimes, at the same time several initiatives are promoted, but they should be further improved to increase the awareness and empathy of receiving populations while avoiding polarization against immigrants.In this paper we describe objectives, motivations and methodology of a new research project, called IHATEPREJUDICE, aimed at addressing hate speech and prejudice against immigrants by exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods and tools.It's novelty consists in the application, mainly to texts extracted from social media, of