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What Is Abusive Language?

Integrating Different Views on Abusive Language for Machine Learning

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Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12021))

Abstract

Abusive language has been corrupting online conversations since the inception of the internet. Substantial research efforts have been put into the investigation and algorithmic resolution of the problem. Different aspects such as “cyberbullying”, “hate speech” or “profanity” have undergone ample amounts of investigation, however, often using inconsistent vocabulary such as “offensive language” or “harassment”. This led to a state of confusion within the research community. The inconsistency can be considered an inhibitor for the domain: It increases the risk of unintentional redundant work and leads to undifferentiated and thus hard to use and justifiable machine learning classifiers. To remedy this effect, this paper introduces a novel configurable, multi-view approach to define abusive language concepts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    With the term “Socially Unacceptable Discourse” [36] introduced another umbrella term, which, however, so far has not received a similar uptake as “Abusive Language”.

  2. 2.

    The third iteration in the year 2019 is already scheduled [7].

  3. 3.

    For example, Facebook is still opening ever new moderation centers [61] and there is a growing amount of reports on how the moderation of content gets ever more unhandable [40].

  4. 4.

    Given the context of the paper, “language” is assumed to refer to written online comments.

  5. 5.

    The theoretical need to obtain a fully-grounded definition for “cruel” as postulated through [44, 45]’s symbol grounding problem is acknowledged. However, a full grounding is beyond the scope of this study and is hence left for future work of a more apt linguist.

  6. 6.

    We subsume anti-semitism, anti-muslim, and other religious utterance at this point.

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Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results received funding from the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE.NRW 2014–2020), Project: (No. CM-2-2-036a).

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  1. University of Münster – ERCIS, Leonardo-Campus 3, 48149, Münster, Germany

    Marco Niemann, Dennis M. Riehle, Jens Brunk & Jörg Becker

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Correspondence to Marco Niemann .

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  1. Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, WWU Münster, Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Christian Grimme

  2. LIACS, Leiden University, Leiden, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    Mike Preuss

  3. LIACS, Leiden University, Leiden, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    Frank W. Takes

  4. Department of Communication, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Annie Waldherr

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Niemann, M., Riehle, D.M., Brunk, J., Becker, J. (2020). What Is Abusive Language?. In: Grimme, C., Preuss, M., Takes, F., Waldherr, A. (eds) Disinformation in Open Online Media. MISDOOM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12021. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39627-5_6

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