<nettime-ann> [call] 1st ACL Workshop on Abusive Language Online

ALW1: 1st Workshop on Abusive Language Online

ACL 2017 (Vancouver, Canada), August 3rd or 4th, 2017

Submission deadline: Spring 2017 (tbd)

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/abusivelanguageworkshop2017/

Overview

The last few years have seen a surge in abusive online behavior, with governments, social media platforms, and individuals struggling to cope with the consequences and to produce effective methods to combat it. In many cases, online forums, comment sections, and social media interaction have become sites of bullying, scapegoating, and hate speech. These forms of online aggression not only poison the social climate of the online communities that experience it, but can also provoke physical violence and harm.

Addressing abusive language necessitates a multi-disciplinary approach that requires knowledge from several fields, including (but not limited to): media studies, natural language processing (NLP), psychology, sociology, law, gender studies, communications, and critical race theory. NLP, as a field that directly works with computationally analyzing language, is in a unique position to develop automated methods to analyse, detect, and filter abusive language. By working across disciplinary divides, researchers in all these fields can produce a comprehensive approach to abusive language that blends together computational, social and legal methods.

In this one-day workshop, we therefore want to bring researchers of various disciplines together to discuss approaches to abusive language. The workshop will include invited speakers and panelists from fields within and outside of NLP, as well as submitted papers from researchers across all areas. In addition, the workshop will host an “unshared task”.

Paper Topics

We invite long and short papers on any of the following general topics:

Assessment of all current methods of addressing abusive language
The social, personal and cultural effects of abusive language online
Legal ramifications of measures taken against abusive language use
NLP models and methods for abusive language detection
Application of NLP tools to analyze social media content and other large data sets
NLP models for cross-lingual abusive language detection

Best practices for using NLP techniques in watchdog settings
Development of corpora and annotation guidelines

Unshared task

In order to encourage focused contributions, we direct researchers to consider the following list of data sets an unshared task, where participants can choose from a list of datasets to conduct their experiments. This list includes:

Twitter Data Set [Waseem and Hovy, NAACL 2016]
German Twitter Data Set [Ross et al. NLP4CMC 2016]
Wikipedia Abusive Language Data Set [Wulczyn et al., Preprint available here]

Submission Information

We will be using the ACL 2017 Submission Guidelines. Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to 8 pages of content with up to 2 additional pages for references. We also invite short papers of up to 4 pages of content, including 2 additional pages for references.

Accepted papers will be given an additional page of content to address reviewer comments. We also invite papers which describe systems are also invited to give a demo of their system. If you would like to present a demo in addition to presenting the paper, please make sure to select either "full paper + demo" or "short paper + demo" under "Submission Category" in the START submission page.

Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The submissions will be reviewed by the program committee. As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...".

We have also included conflict of interest in the submission form. You should mark all potential reviewers who have been authors on the paper, are from the same research group or institution, or who have seen versions of this paper or discussed it with you.

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions.

Important Dates

Submission due: April 27th

Author Notification: May 17th

Camera Ready: May 26th

Workshop Date: August 3rd or 4th

Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/acl2017/alw/

Organizing Committee

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown University
Dirk Hovy, University of Copenhagen
Joel Tetreault, Grammarly
Zeerak Waseem, University of Copenhagen

Program Committee/Reviewers

The following researchers have agreed to serve on the program committee as reviewers.

Swati Agarwal, IIIT Delhi, India
Fiona Barnett, Duke University, USA
Darina Benikova, University of Duisburg-Essen, LTL, Germany
Simone Browne, UT Austin, USA
Anneke Buffone, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Pete Burnap, Cardiff University, United Kingdom
Christina Capodilupo, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA
Guillermo Carbonell, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Pedro Cardoso, Synthesio, France
Gabriella Coleman, McGill, Canada
Bart Desmet, LT3, Ghent University, Belgium
Lucas Dixon, Jigsaw, USA
Nemanja Djuric, Uber ATC, USA
Jacob Eisenstein, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Hugo Jair Escalante, INAOE, Mexico
Lucie Flekova, UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt, Germany
Matthew Fuller, Goldsmith, UK
Tanton Gibbs, Facebook, USA
Lee Gillam, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Jen Golbeck, University of Maryland, USA
Erica Greene, New York Times, USA
Kevin Hamilton, University of Illinois, USA
Sora Han, University of California, Irvine, USA
Christopher Homan, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Veronique Hoste, Ghent University, Belgium
Ruihong Huang, Texas A&M, USA
Els Lefever, LT3, Ghent University, Belgium
Shuhua Liu, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland
Elizabeth Losh, College of William and Mary, USA
Shervin Malmasi, Harvard Medical School, USA
Fumito Masui, Kitami Institute of Technology, Japan
Yashar Mehdad, Airbnb, USA
Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan, USA
Mainack Mondal, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany
Manuel Montes-y-Gómez, INAOE, Mexico
Kevin Munger, NYU, USA
Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar
Courtney Napoles, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Chikashi Nobata, Apple, USA
Guy De Pauw, CLiPS - University of Antwerp, Belgium
Whitney Phillips, Mercer University, USA
Karolien Poels, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Martin Potthast, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany
Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Michal Ptaszynski, Kitami Institute of Technology, Japan
Awais Rashid, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Björn Ross, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
Masoud Rouhizadeh, Stony Brook University & University of Pennsylvania, USA
Christina Sauper, Facebook, USA
Molly Sauter, McGill University, Canada
Nishant Shah, Leuphana, ArtEZ University of the Arts, CIS (Bangalore), India
Thamar Solorio, University of Houston, USA
Jeffrey Sorensen, Jigsaw, USA
Dennis Tenen, Columbia University, USA
Jennifer Terry, University of California, Irvine, USA
Achint Thomas, Embibe Indiavidual Inc, India
Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Lyle Ungar, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Anna Vartapetiance, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Kristin Veel, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Erik Velldal, University of Oslo, Norway
Ingmar Weber, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
Jacque Wernimont, Arizona State University, USA
Michael Wojatzki, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Lilia Øvrelid, University of Oslo, Norway

whkc

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Professor, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University