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Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale

Authors:

Ellery Wulczyn,

Lucas DixonAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '17: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web

Pages 1391 - 1399

https://doi.org/10.1145/3038912.3052591

Published: 03 April 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The damage personal attacks cause to online discourse motivates many platforms to try to curb the phenomenon. However, understanding the prevalence and impact of personal attacks in online platforms at scale remains surprisingly difficult. The contribution of this paper is to develop and illustrate a method that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to analyze personal attacks at scale. We show an evaluation method for a classifier in terms of the aggregated number of crowd-workers it can approximate. We apply our methodology to English Wikipedia, generating a corpus of over 100k high quality human-labeled comments and 63M machine-labeled ones from a classifier that is as good as the aggregate of 3 crowd-workers, as measured by the area under the ROC curve and Spearman correlation. Using this corpus of machine-labeled scores, our methodology allows us to explore some of the open questions about the nature of online personal attacks. This reveals that the majority of personal attacks on Wikipedia are not the result of a few malicious users, nor primarily the consequence of allowing anonymous contributions from unregistered users.

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Cited By

Bulathwela SPérez-Ortiz MHolloway CCukurova MShawe-Taylor J(2024)Artificial Intelligence Alone Will Not Democratise Education: On Educational Inequality, Techno-Solutionism and Inclusive ToolsSustainability10.3390/su1602078116:2(781)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/su16020781
Bonechi S(2024)Development of an Automated Moderator for Deliberative EventsElectronics10.3390/electronics1303054413:3(544)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13030544
Yu ZSen IAssenmacher DSamory MFröhling LDahn CNozza DWagner C(2024)The Unseen Targets of Hate: A Systematic Review of Hateful Communication DatasetsSocial Science Computer Review10.1177/08944393241258771Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241258771
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Index Terms

Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Natural language processing
      1. Discourse, dialogue and pragmatics
2. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications
    1. Collaborative and social computing systems and tools
      1. Wikis

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

WWW '17: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web

April 2017

1678 pages

ISBN:9781450349130

General Chairs:
Rick Barrett
W3Events
,
Rick Cummings
Murdoch University
,
Program Chairs:
Eugene Agichtein
Emory University
,
Evgeniy Gabrilovich
Google Research

Copyright © 2017 Copyright is held by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2).

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IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee

Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

Publication History

Published: 03 April 2017

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WWW '17

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IW3C2

WWW '17: 26th International World Wide Web Conference

April 3 - 7, 2017

Perth, Australia

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WWW '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 966 submissions, 17%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

Bulathwela SPérez-Ortiz MHolloway CCukurova MShawe-Taylor J(2024)Artificial Intelligence Alone Will Not Democratise Education: On Educational Inequality, Techno-Solutionism and Inclusive ToolsSustainability10.3390/su1602078116:2(781)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/su16020781
Bonechi S(2024)Development of an Automated Moderator for Deliberative EventsElectronics10.3390/electronics1303054413:3(544)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13030544
Yu ZSen IAssenmacher DSamory MFröhling LDahn CNozza DWagner C(2024)The Unseen Targets of Hate: A Systematic Review of Hateful Communication DatasetsSocial Science Computer Review10.1177/08944393241258771Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393241258771
Islam MSutton SRafiq R(2024)A Generative AI Powered Approach to Cyberbullying DetectionProceedings of the 2024 8th International Conference on Information System and Data Mining10.1145/3686397.3686407(57-63)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686397.3686407
Li LFan LAtreja SHemphill L(2024)“HOT” ChatGPT: The Promise of ChatGPT in Detecting and Discriminating Hateful, Offensive, and Toxic Comments on Social MediaACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/364382918:2(1-36)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643829
Gomez JMachado CPaes LCalmon F(2024)Algorithmic Arbitrariness in Content ModerationProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3630106.3659036(2234-2253)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630106.3659036
Davani ADíaz MBaker DPrabhakaran V(2024)Disentangling Perceptions of Offensiveness: Cultural and Moral CorrelatesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3630106.3659021(2007-2021)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630106.3659021
Shawkat NSaquer JShatnawi HLo DGamess E(2024)Evaluation of Different Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques for Hate Speech DetectionProceedings of the 2024 ACM Southeast Conference10.1145/3603287.3651218(253-258)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2024
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Etta GCinelli MMarco NAvalle MPanconesi AQuattrociocchi W(2024)A Topology-Based Approach for Predicting Toxic Outcomes on Twitter and YouTubeIEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering10.1109/TNSE.2024.339821911:5(4875-4885)Online publication date: Sep-2024
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Sujud RFahs WKhatoun RChbib F(2024)Cyberbullying Detection Using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)2024 IEEE International Mediterranean Conference on Communications and Networking (MeditCom)10.1109/MeditCom61057.2024.10621093(257-262)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
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