On the rise of fear speech in online social media

Recently, social media platforms are heavily moderated to prevent the spread of online hate speech, which is usually fertile in toxic words and is directed toward an individual or a community. Owing to such heavy moderation, newer and more subtle techniques are being deployed. One of the most striking among these is fear speech. Fear speech, as the name suggests, attempts to incite fear about a target community. Although subtle, it might be highly effective, often pushing communities toward a physical conflict. Therefore, understanding their prevalence in social media is of paramount importance. This article presents a large-scale study to understand the prevalence of 400K fear speech and over 700K hate speech posts collected from Gab.com. Remarkably, users posting a large number of fear speech accrue more followers and occupy more central positions in social networks than users posting a large number of hate speech. They can also reach out to benign users more effectively than hate speech users through replies, reposts, and mentions. This connects to the fact that, unlike hate speech, fear speech has almost zero toxic content, making it look plausible. Moreover, while fear speech topics mostly portray a community as a perpetrator using a (fake) chain of argumentation, hate speech topics hurl direct multitarget insults, thus pointing to why general users could be more gullible to fear speech. Our findings transcend even to other platforms (Twitter and Facebook) and thus necessitate using sophisticated moderation policies and mass awareness to combat fear speech.

Diversity matters: Robustness of bias measurements in Wikidata

With the widespread use of knowledge graphs (KG) in various automated AI systems and applications, it is very important to ensure that information retrieval algorithms leveraging them are free from societal biases. Previous works have depicted biases that persist in KGs, as well as employed several metrics for measuring the biases. However, such studies lack the systematic exploration of the sensitivity of the bias measurements, through varying sources of data, or the embedding algorithms used. To address this research gap, in this work, we present a holistic analysis of bias measurement on the knowledge graph. First, we attempt to reveal data biases that surface in Wikidata for thirteen different demographics selected from seven continents. Next, we attempt to unfold the variance in the detection of biases by two different knowledge graph embedding algorithms - TransE and ComplEx. We conduct our extensive experiments on a large number of occupations sampled from the thirteen demographics with respect to the sensitive attribute, i.e., gender. Our results show that the inherent data bias that persists in KG can be altered by specific algorithm bias as incorporated by KG embedding learning algorithms. Further, we show that the choice of the state-of-the-art KG embedding algorithm has a strong impact on the ranking of biased occupations irrespective of gender. We observe that the similarity of the biased occupations across demographics is minimal which reflects the socio-cultural differences around the globe. We believe that this full-scale audit of the bias measurement pipeline will raise awareness among the community while deriving insights related to design choices of data and algorithms both and refrain from the popular dogma of ``one-size-fits-all''.

HateProof: Are Hateful Meme Detection Systems really Robust?

Exploiting social media to spread hate has tremendously increased over the years. Lately, multi-modal hateful content such as memes has drawn relatively more traction than uni-modal content. Moreover, the availability of implicit content payloads makes them fairly challenging to be detected by existing hateful meme detection systems. In this paper, we present a use case study to analyze such systems' vulnerabilities against external adversarial attacks. We find that even very simple perturbations in uni-modal and multi-modal settings performed by humans with little knowledge about the model can make the existing detection models highly vulnerable. Empirically, we find a noticeable performance drop of as high as 10% in the macro-F1 score for certain attacks. As a remedy, we attempt to boost the model's robustness using contrastive learning as well as an adversarial training-based method - VILLA. Using an ensemble of the above two approaches, in two of our high resolution datasets, we are able to (re)gain back the performance to a large extent for certain attacks. We believe that ours is a first step toward addressing this crucial problem in an adversarial setting and would inspire more such investigations in the future.

RAFT: Rationale adaptor for few-shot abusive language detection

Abusive language is a concerning problem in online social media. Past research on detecting abusive language covers different platforms, languages, demographies, etc. However, models trained using these datasets do not perform well in cross-domain evaluation settings. To overcome this, a common strategy is to use a few samples from the target domain to train models to get better performance in that domain (cross-domain few-shot training). However, this might cause the models to overfit the artefacts of those samples. A compelling solution could be to guide the models toward rationales, i.e., spans of text that justify the text's label. This method has been found to improve model performance in the in-domain setting across various NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose RAFT (Rationale Adaptor for Few-shoT classification) for abusive language detection. We first build a multitask learning setup to jointly learn rationales, targets, and labels, and find a significant improvement of 6% macro F1 on the rationale detection task over training solely rationale classifiers. We introduce two rationale-integrated BERT-based architectures (the RAFT models) and evaluate our systems over five different abusive language datasets, finding that in the few-shot classification setting, RAFT-based models outperform baseline models by about 7% in macro F1 scores and perform competitively to models finetuned on other source domains. Furthermore, RAFT-based models outperform LIME/SHAP-based approaches in terms of plausibility and are close in performance in terms of faithfulness.

Hate Speech and Offensive Language Detection in Bengali

Social media often serves as a breeding ground for various hateful and offensive content. Identifying such content on social media is crucial due to its impact on the race, gender, or religion in an unprejudiced society. However, while there is extensive research in hate speech detection in English, there is a gap in hateful content detection in low-resource languages like Bengali. Besides, a current trend on social media is the use of Romanized Bengali for regular interactions. To overcome the existing research's limitations, in this study, we develop an annotated dataset of 10K Bengali posts consisting of 5K actual and 5K Romanized Bengali tweets. We implement several baseline models for the classification of such hateful posts. We further explore the interlingual transfer mechanism to boost classification performance. Finally, we perform an in-depth error analysis by looking into the misclassified posts by the models. While training actual and Romanized datasets separately, we observe that XLM-Roberta performs the best. Further, we witness that on joint training and few-shot training, MuRIL outperforms other models by interpreting the semantic expressions better. We make our code and dataset public for others.

Fast Few shot Self-attentive Semi-supervised Political Inclination Prediction

With the rising participation of the common mass in social media, it is increasingly common now for policymakers/journalists to create online polls on social media to understand the political leanings of people in specific locations. The caveat here is that only influential people can make such an online polling and reach out at a mass scale. Further, in such cases, the distribution of voters is not controllable and may be, in fact, biased. On the other hand,if we can interpret the publicly available data over social media to probe the political inclination of users, we will be able to have controllable insights about the survey population, keep the cost of survey low and also collect publicly available data without involving the concerned persons. Hence we introduce a self-attentive semi-supervised framework for political inclination detection to further that objective. The advantage of our model is that it neither needs huge training data nor does it need to store social network parameters. Nevertheless, it achieves an accuracy of 93.7\% with no annotated data; further, with only a few annotated examples per class it achieves competitive performance. We found that the model is highly efficient even in resource-constrained settings, and insights drawn from its predictions match the manual survey outcomes when applied to diverse real-life scenarios.

Decoding Demographic un-fairness from Indian Names

Demographic classification is essential in fairness assessment in recommender systems or in measuring unintended bias in online networks and voting systems. Important fields like education and politics, which often lay a foundation for the future of equality in society, need scrutiny to design policies that can better foster equality in resource distribution constrained by the unbalanced demographic distribution of people in the country. We collect three publicly available datasets to train state-of-the-art classifiers in the domain of gender and caste classification. We train the models in the Indian context, where the same name can have different styling conventions (Jolly Abraham/Kumar Abhishikta in one state may be written as Abraham Jolly/Abishikta Kumar in the other). Finally, we also perform cross-testing (training and testing on different datasets) to understand the efficacy of the above models. We also perform an error analysis of the prediction models. Finally, we attempt to assess the bias in the existing Indian system as case studies and find some intriguing patterns manifesting in the complex demographic layout of the sub-continent across the dimensions of gender and caste.

"Dummy Grandpa, do you know anything?": Identifying and Characterizing Ad hominem Fallacy Usage in the Wild

Today, participating in discussions on online forums is extremely commonplace and these discussions have started rendering a strong influence on the overall opinion of online users. Naturally, twisting the flow of the argument can have a strong impact on the minds of naive users, which in the long run might have socio-political ramifications, for example, winning an election or spreading targeted misinformation. Thus, these platforms are potentially highly vulnerable to malicious players who might act individually or as a cohort to breed fallacious arguments with a motive to sway public opinion. Ad hominem arguments are one of the most effective forms of such fallacies. Although a simple fallacy, it is effective enough to sway public debates in offline world and can be used as a precursor to shutting down the voice of opposition by slander. In this work, we take a first step in shedding light on the usage of ad hominem fallacies in the wild. First, we build a powerful ad hominem detector with high accuracy (F1 more than 83%, showing a significant improvement over prior work), even for datasets for which annotated instances constitute a very small fraction. We then used our detector on 265k arguments collected from the online debate forum - CreateDebate. Our crowdsourced surveys validate our in-the-wild predictions on CreateDebate data (94% match with manual annotation). Our analysis revealed that a surprising 31.23% of CreateDebate content contains ad hominem fallacy, and a cohort of highly active users post significantly more ad hominem to suppress opposing views. Then, our temporal analysis revealed that ad hominem argument usage increased significantly since the 2016 US Presidential election, not only for topics like Politics, but also for Science and Law. We conclude by discussing important implications of our work to detect and defend against ad hominem fallacies.

Is this bug severe? A text-cum-graph based model for bug severity prediction

Repositories of large software systems have become commonplace. This massive expansion has resulted in the emergence of various problems in these software platforms including identification of (i) bug-prone packages, (ii) critical bugs, and (iii) severity of bugs. One of the important goals would be to mine these bugs and recommend them to the developers to resolve them. The first step to this is that one has to accurately detect the extent of severity of the bugs. In this paper, we take up this task of predicting the severity of bugs in the near future. Contextualized neural models built on the text description of a bug and the user comments about the bug help to achieve reasonably good performance. Further information on how the bugs are related to each other in terms of the ways they affect packages can be summarised in the form of a graph and used along with the text to get additional benefits.

Placing Facts on a Timeline: A Classification cum Coref Resolution Approach

A timeline provides one of the most effective ways to visualize the important historical facts that occurred over a period of time, presenting the insights that may not be so apparent from reading the equivalent information in textual form. By leveraging generative adversarial learning for important sentence classification and by assimilating knowledge based tags for improving the performance of event coreference resolution we introduce a two staged system for event timeline generation from multiple (historical) text documents. We demonstrate our results on two manually annotated historical text documents. Our results can be extremely helpful for historians, in advancing research in history and in understanding the socio-political landscape of a country as reflected in the writings of famous personas.