DefVerify: Do Hate Speech Models Reflect Their Dataset's Definition?
This addresses the issue of model misalignment in hate speech detection for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing workflows.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring hate speech detection models align with user-defined definitions, proposing DefVerify to quantify and identify gaps, finding discrepancies in six benchmark datasets.
When building a predictive model, it is often difficult to ensure that application-specific requirements are encoded by the model that will eventually be deployed. Consider researchers working on hate speech detection. They will have an idea of what is considered hate speech, but building a model that reflects their view accurately requires preserving those ideals throughout the workflow of data set construction and model training. Complications such as sampling bias, annotation bias, and model misspecification almost always arise, possibly resulting in a gap between the application specification and the model's actual behavior upon deployment. To address this issue for hate speech detection, we propose DefVerify: a 3-step procedure that (i) encodes a user-specified definition of hate speech, (ii) quantifies to what extent the model reflects the intended definition, and (iii) tries to identify the point of failure in the workflow. We use DefVerify to find gaps between definition and model behavior when applied to six popular hate speech benchmark datasets.