Beyond Hate Speech: NLP's Challenges and Opportunities in Uncovering Dehumanizing Language

Dehumanization, characterized as a subtle yet harmful manifestation of hate speech, involves denying individuals of their human qualities and often results in violence against marginalized groups. Despite significant progress in Natural Language Processing across various domains, its application in detecting dehumanizing language is limited, largely due to the scarcity of publicly available annotated data for this domain. This paper evaluates the performance of cutting-edge NLP models, including GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and LLAMA-2, in identifying dehumanizing language. Our findings reveal that while these models demonstrate potential, achieving a 70\% accuracy rate in distinguishing dehumanizing language from broader hate speech, they also display biases. They are over-sensitive in classifying other forms of hate speech as dehumanization for a specific subset of target groups, while more frequently failing to identify clear cases of dehumanization for other target groups. Moreover, leveraging one of the best-performing models, we automatically annotated a larger dataset for training more accessible models. However, our findings indicate that these models currently do not meet the high-quality data generation threshold necessary for this task.