19. Constructing a Taxonomy of Implicit Hate Speech Grounded in Social Theory with Diyi Yang and David Muchlinski

Diaries of Social Data Research

Our guests on this episode are Diyi Yang, assistant professor at the School of Interactive Computing, and David Muchlinski, assistant professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, both at Georgia Tech. We discuss their EMNLP 2021 paper, "Latent Hatred: A Benchmark for Understanding Implicit Hate Speech." This paper is co-authored with Mai ElSherief, Caleb Ziems, Vaishnavi Anupindi, Jordyn Seybolt, and Munmun De Choudhury.

Diyi and David reveal that the annotation process behind this paper took two years and incorporated domain expertise on the broader context around hateful language. That is, an understanding of the social groups who produce this language allowed for better categorization and interpretation of implicit hate. We also discuss the cross-discipline connections they’ve forged in the past and present, and the ongoing challenges this type of work poses for computational methods.