A Legal Approach to Hate Speech: Operationalizing the EU's Legal Framework against the Expression of Hatred as an NLP Task

Understand

We propose a 'legal approach' to hate speech detection by operationalization of the decision as to whether a post is subject to criminal law into an NLP task.

• Comparing existing regulatory regimes for hate speech, we base our investigation on the European Union's framework as it provides a widely applicable legal minimum standard.
• Accurately judging whether a post is punishable or not usually requires legal training.
• We show that, by breaking the legal assessment down into a series of simpler sub-decisions, even laypersons can annotate consistently.