Michael L. Best

William Held, Camille Harris, Michael Best et al. · gatech

Coloniality, the continuation of colonial harms beyond "official" colonization, has pervasive effects across society and scientific fields. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is no exception to this broad phenomenon. In this work, we argue that coloniality is implicitly embedded in and amplified by NLP data, algorithms, and software. We formalize this analysis using Actor-Network Theory (ANT): an approach to understanding social phenomena through the network of relationships between human stakeholders and technology. We use our Actor-Network to guide a quantitative survey of the geography of different phases of NLP research, providing evidence that inequality along colonial boundaries increases as NLP builds on itself. Based on this, we argue that combating coloniality in NLP requires not only changing current values but also active work to remove the accumulation of colonial ideals in our foundational data and algorithms.

Aman Khullar, Daniel Nkemelu, Cuong V. Nguyen et al.

A growing body of work has focused on text classification methods for detecting the increasing amount of hate speech posted online. This progress has been limited to only a select number of highly-resourced languages causing detection systems to either under-perform or not exist in limited data contexts. This is majorly caused by a lack of training data which is expensive to collect and curate in these settings. In this work, we propose a data augmentation approach that addresses the problem of lack of data for online hate speech detection in limited data contexts using synthetic data generation techniques. Given a handful of hate speech examples in a high-resource language such as English, we present three methods to synthesize new examples of hate speech data in a target language that retains the hate sentiment in the original examples but transfers the hate targets. We apply our approach to generate training data for hate speech classification tasks in Hindi and Vietnamese. Our findings show that a model trained on synthetic data performs comparably to, and in some cases outperforms, a model trained only on the samples available in the target domain. This method can be adopted to bootstrap hate speech detection models from scratch in limited data contexts. As the growth of social media within these contexts continues to outstrip response efforts, this work furthers our capacities for detection, understanding, and response to hate speech.