2020

Confronting Abusive Language Online: A Survey from the Ethical and Human Rights Perspective

Kiritchenko, Svetlana, Nejadgholi, Isar, Fraser, Kathleen C.

Understand

The pervasiveness of abusive content on the internet can lead to severe psychological and physical harm.

  • Significant effort in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has been devoted to addressing this problem through abusive content detection and related sub-areas, such as the detection of hate speech, toxicity, cyberbullying, etc.
  • Although current technologies achieve high classification performance in research studies, it has been observed that the real-life application of this technology can cause unintended harms, such as the silencing of under-represented groups.
  • We review a large body of NLP research on automatic abuse detection with a new focus on ethical challenges, organized around eight established ethical principles: privacy, accountability, safety and security, transparency and explainability, fairness and non-discrimination, human control of technology, professional responsibility, and promotion of human values.

Reading the bibliography…