Targets and Aspects in Social Media Hate Speech
Alexander Vitalievich Shvets, Paula Fortuna, Juan Soler-Company, Leo Wanner · 2021
Mainstream research on hate speech focused so far predominantly on the task of classifying mainly social media posts with respect to predefined typologies of rather coarse-grained hate speech categories.This may be sufficient if the goal is to detect and delete abusive language posts.However, removal is not always possible due to the legislation of a country.Also, there is evidence that hate speech cannot be successfully combated by merely removing hate speech posts; they should be countered by education and counter-narratives.For this purpose, we need to identify (i) who is the target in a given hate speech post, and (ii) what aspects (or characteristics) of the target are attributed to the target in the post.As the first approximation, we propose to adapt a generic state-of-the-art concept extraction model to the hate speech domain.The outcome of the experiments is promising and can serve as inspiration for further work on the task.