34.1284, Calls: 1st Workshop on Counter Speech for Online Abuse

Thu Apr 20 22:05:02 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1284. Thu Apr 20 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1284, Calls: 1st Workshop on Counter Speech for Online Abuse

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Date: 21-Apr-2023
From: Helena Bonaldi [hbonaldi at fbk.eu]
Subject: 1st Workshop on Counter Speech for Online Abuse

Full Title: 1st Workshop on Counter Speech for Online Abuse
Short Title: CS4OA

Date: 11-Sep-2023 - 12-Sep-2023
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Contact Person: Helena Bonaldi
Meeting Email: cs4oa at googlegroups.com
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/cs4oa

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics

Call Deadline: 26-Jun-2023

Meeting Description:

A workshop for creating, investigating and improving tools for
producing and evaluating counter speech.

Hate speech and abusive and toxic language are prevalent in online
spaces. For example, a 2019 survey shows that in the UK 30-40% of
people have experienced online abuse, and platforms like Facebook
bring down millions of harmful posts every year, with the help of AI
tools. While removal of such content can immediately reduce the
quantity of harmful messages, it can bring about accusations of
censorship and may not be effective at curbing hate in the long term.
An alternative approach is to reply with counter speech, i.e. targeted
responses aimed at refuting the hateful language using thoughtful and
cogent reasons, and fact-bound arguments (Schieb and Preuss, 2016).
This has been shown to be effective in influencing the behaviour of
both the perpetrators of abuse and bystanders that witness the
interactions, as well as providing support to victims.

The sheer amount of social media data shared online on a daily basis
means that hate mitigation, using counter speech, requires reliable,
efficient and scalable tools. Recently, efforts have been made to
curate hate countering datasets and automate the production of counter
speech. However, this research field is still in its infancy, and many
questions remain open regarding the most effective approaches and
methods to take, as well as how to evaluate them.

This first multidisciplinary workshop aims to bring together
researchers from diverse backgrounds such as computer science and the
social sciences, as well as policy makers and other stakeholders to
attempt to understand how counter speech is currently used to tackle
abuse by individuals, activists and organisations, how Natural
Language Processing (NLP) and Generation (NLG) can be applied to
produce counter narratives, and the implications of using large
language models for this task. It will also address, but not be
limited to, the questions of how to evaluate and measure the impacts
of counter speech, the importance of expert knowledge from civil
society in the development of counter speech datasets and taxonomies,
and how to ensure fairness and mitigate the biases present in language
models when generating counter speech.

Call for Papers:

Topics
We invite papers (long and short) on a wide range of topics, including
but not limited to:
- Models and methods for generating counter speech;
- Dialogue agents employing counter speech to address hateful inputs,
directed towards other people or the AI itself;
- Human and automatic evaluation methods of counter speech tools;
- Multidisciplinary studies including different perspectives on the
topic such as from computer science, social science, NGOs and
stakeholders;
- Development of datasets and taxonomy for counter speech;
- Potentials and limitations (e.g., fairness, biases) of using large
language models for generating counter speech;
- Social impact and empirical studies of counter speech on social
media, including investigating the effectiveness and consequences on
users of employing counter speech to fight online hate
- Proposals for future research on counter speech, and/or preliminary
results of studies in this field

We accept three types of submissions:
Regular research papers – long (8 pages) or short (4 pages);
Non-archival submissions: like research papers, but will not be
included in the proceedings;
Research communications: 2-4 page abstracts summarising relevant
research published elsewhere.
Submission link: Coming soon!

Important dates
All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12)
Submission deadline: Jun 26, 2023
Notification of acceptance Jul 17, 2023
Camera-ready deadline Aug 11, 2023
Workshop date: September 11/12 2023

Format and Styling
Submissions should follow ACL Author Guidelines and policies for
submission, review and citation, and be anonymised for double blind
reviewing. Please use ACL 2023 style files; LaTeX style files and
Microsoft Word templates are available at
https://2023.aclweb.org/calls/style_and_formatting/.

Organising Committee:
Yi-Ling Chung, The Alan Turing Institute
Gavin Abercrombie, Heriot-Watt University
Helena Bonaldi, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Marco Guerini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Contact
If you have any questions, please let us know at
cs4oa at googlegroups.com
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/cs4oa
Twitter: @cs4oa_workshop

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