Incivility Detection in Online Comments
Farig Sadeque, Stephen A. Rains, Yotam Shmargad, Kate M. Kenski, Kevin Coe, Steven J. Bethard · 2019
Incivility in public discourse has been a major concern in recent times as it can affect the quality and tenacity of the discourse negatively.In this paper, we present neural models that can learn to detect name-calling and vulgarity from a newspaper comment section.We show that in contrast to prior work on detecting toxic language, fine-grained incivilities like namecalling cannot be accurately detected by simple models like logistic regression.We apply the models trained on the newspaper comments data to detect uncivil comments in a Russian troll dataset, and find that despite the change of domain, the model makes accurate predictions.