35.826, Calls: 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-826. Mon Mar 11 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.826, Calls: 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms

Moderators: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Daniel Swanson, Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Zackary Leech, Lynzie Coburn, Natasha Singh, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Zackary Leech <zleech at linguistlist.org>

LINGUIST List is hosted by Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences.
================================================================


Date: 11-Mar-2024
From: Yi-Ling Chung [ychung at turing.ac.uk]
Subject: 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms


Full Title: 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms
Short Title: WOAH

Date: 20-Jun-2024 - 21-Jun-2024
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Contact Person: Organizers of Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms
Meeting Email: organizers at workshopononlineabuse.com
Web Site: https://www.workshopononlineabuse.com/

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Discourse Analysis;
General Linguistics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics

Call Deadline: 17-Mar-2024

Meeting Description:

Digital technologies bring societal benefits by reshaping
communication and interactions. However, they also enable harmful
behaviors like hate speech and harassment to reach larger audiences,
magnifying their negative impact. A 2018 Pew Research survey revealed
40% of American adults faced online harassment, while platforms like
Facebook remove millions of hateful posts every quarter. Addressing
online abuse is a key focus for tech, regulators, and governments,
permeating civic discussions. Given the vast online content,
countering abuse necessitates computational tools for reliable and
scalable solutions. Without high-quality research, we risk inaccurate,
unfair, and inefficient abusive content detection systems. As a field
that works directly with the computational analysis of language, the
NLP field has a unique role in advancing this area, despite the
intricate challenges of detecting online abuse. While research has
grown in recent years, the field remains immature. Defining abusive
content, field boundaries, and NLP system evaluation are unresolved.
Key areas like multi-modal, cross-domain, and cross-lingual abuse
detection lack sufficient focus. Training data, as in many areas of
NLP and ML, has become a pivotal concern in detecting abusive content.
However, widely used datasets are often small, with irregular and
undocumented annotation practices, flaws, and biases. Moreover, scant
research focuses on alternatives to content removal, like
counterspeech or promoting positive content, which intervene against
abuse and support victims. WOAH is committed to interrogating the
design, creation and use of datasets, publishing research emphasising
the necessity for diverse datasets and to gathering insights for
policies and strategies in abuse intervention. We are also committed
to bringing together NLP researchers with a range of other groups,
such as people who have or are likely to suffer discrimination; ethics
researchers; sociologists and social scientists; technologists; and
legal experts.

2nd Call for Papers:

We invite paper submissions to the 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and
Harms, which will take place on June 20/21 at NAACL 2024 (Deadline
extended)

Website: https://www.workshopononlineabuse.com/cfp.html

Important Dates
Submission due: March 17, 2024
ARR reviewed submission due: April 7, 2024
Notification of acceptance: April 14, 2024
Camera-ready papers due: April 24, 2024
Workshop: June 20/21, 2024

Overview
Digital technologies have brought many benefits for society,
transforming how people connect, communicate and interact with each
other. However, they have also enabled abusive and harmful content
such as hate speech and harassment to reach large audiences, and for
their negative effects to be amplified. The sheer amount of content
shared online means that abuse and harm can only be tackled at scale
with the help of computational tools. However, detecting and
moderating online abuse and harms is a difficult task, with many
technical, social, legal and ethical challenges. The Workshop on
Online Abuse and Harms invites paper submissions from a wide range of
fields, including natural language processing, machine learning,
computational social sciences, law, politics, psychology, sociology
and cultural studies. We explicitly encourage interdisciplinary
submissions, technical as well as non-technical submissions, and
submissions that focus on under-resourced languages. We also invite
non-archival submissions and civil society reports.

The topics covered by WOAH include, but are not limited to:
New models or methods for detecting abusive and harmful online
content, including misinformation;
Biases and limitations of existing detection models or datasets for
abusive and harmful online content, particularly those in commercial
use;
New datasets and taxonomies for online abuse and harms;
New evaluation metrics and procedures for the detection of harmful
content;
Dynamics of online abuse and harms, as well as their impact on
different communities
Social, legal, and ethical implications of detecting, monitoring and
moderating online abuse

In addition, we invite submissions related to the theme for this
eighth edition of WOAH, which will be online harms in the age of large
language models. Highly capable Large Language Models (LLMs) are now
widely deployed and easily accessible by millions across the globe.
Without proper safeguards, these LLMs will readily follow malicious
instructions and generate toxic content. Even the safest LLMs can be
exploited by bad actors for harmful purposes. With this theme, we
invite submissions that explore the implications of LLMs for the
creation, dissemination and detection of harmful online content. We
are interested in how to stop LLMs from following malicious
instructions and generating toxic content, but also how they could be
used to improve content moderation and enable countermeasures like
personalised counterspeech. To support our theme, we have invited an
interdisciplinary line-up of high-profile speakers across academia,
industry and public policy.

Submission
Submission is electronic, using this Softconf submission link:
https://softconf.com/naacl2024/WOAH2024/manager/scmd.cgi?scmd=submitPa
perCustom&pageid=0&isPreview=yes

The workshop will accept three types of papers.

Academic Papers (long and short): Long papers of up to 8 pages,
excluding references, and short papers of up to 4 pages, excluding
references. Unlimited pages for references and appendices. Accepted
papers will be given an additional page of content to address reviewer
comments. Previously published papers cannot be accepted.
Non-Archival Submissions: Up to 2 pages, excluding references, to
summarise and showcase in-progress work and work published elsewhere.
Civil Society Reports: Non-archival submissions, with a minimum of 2
pages and no upper limit. Can include work published elsewhere

Please send any questions about the workshop to
organizers at workshopononlineabuse.com



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please consider donating to the Linguist List https://give.myiu.org/iu-bloomington/I320011968.html


LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Equinox Publishing Ltd http://www.equinoxpub.com/

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-35-826
----------------------------------------------------------