BAN-PL: a Novel Polish Dataset of Banned Harmful and Offensive Content from Wykop.pl web service
This addresses the problem of limited resources for NLP researchers working on automated content moderation in Polish, though it is incremental as it primarily provides a dataset rather than a novel method.
The authors tackled the lack of publicly available datasets for offensive content moderation in Polish by creating BAN-PL, a new open dataset from Wykop.pl with 691,662 posts and comments evenly split into harmful and neutral categories, including an anonymized subset of 24,000 pieces.
Since the Internet is flooded with hate, it is one of the main tasks for NLP experts to master automated online content moderation. However, advancements in this field require improved access to publicly available accurate and non-synthetic datasets of social media content. For the Polish language, such resources are very limited. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting a new open dataset of offensive social media content for the Polish language. The dataset comprises content from Wykop.pl, a popular online service often referred to as the "Polish Reddit", reported by users and banned in the internal moderation process. It contains a total of 691,662 posts and comments, evenly divided into two categories: "harmful" and "neutral" ("non-harmful"). The anonymized subset of the BAN-PL dataset consisting on 24,000 pieces (12,000 for each class), along with preprocessing scripts have been made publicly available. Furthermore the paper offers valuable insights into real-life content moderation processes and delves into an analysis of linguistic features and content characteristics of the dataset. Moreover, a comprehensive anonymization procedure has been meticulously described and applied. The prevalent biases encountered in similar datasets, including post-moderation and pre-selection biases, are also discussed.