Hate Speech Classifiers Learn Human-Like Social Stereotypes
This work addresses bias in hate speech moderation for fairness in machine learning, though it is incremental in combining existing methods from social psychology and computational linguistics.
The study investigated how social stereotypes influence hate speech classifiers, finding that these models learn human-like biases from annotated data, leading to systematic prediction errors that can perpetuate social inequalities.
Social stereotypes negatively impact individuals' judgements about different groups and may have a critical role in how people understand language directed toward minority social groups. Here, we assess the role of social stereotypes in the automated detection of hateful language by examining the relation between individual annotator biases and erroneous classification of texts by hate speech classifiers. Specifically, in Study 1 we investigate the impact of novice annotators' stereotypes on their hate-speech-annotation behavior. In Study 2 we examine the effect of language-embedded stereotypes on expert annotators' aggregated judgements in a large annotated corpus. Finally, in Study 3 we demonstrate how language-embedded stereotypes are associated with systematic prediction errors in a neural-network hate speech classifier. Our results demonstrate that hate speech classifiers learn human-like biases which can further perpetuate social inequalities when propagated at scale. This framework, combining social psychological and computational linguistic methods, provides insights into additional sources of bias in hate speech moderation, informing ongoing debates regarding fairness in machine learning.