2nd Workshop on Abusive Language Online

***************** First Call for Papers ******************************
ALW2: 2nd Workshop on Abusive Language Online
EMNLP 2018 (Brussels, Belgium), October 31st or November 1st, 2018
Submission deadline: July 27th, 2018
Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/ALW2/
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/alw2018
Contact: alw-organizers [at] googlegroups.com
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***** Deadline Extended: New Submission deadline July 27th *****
***** Accepted papers will be considered for a Special issue in the journal First Monday (http://firstmonday.org) planned for Fall 2019 *****

Overview
Interaction amongst users on social networking platforms can enable constructive and insightful conversations and civic participation; however, on many sites that encourage user interaction, verbal abuse has become commonplace, leading to negative outcomes such as cyberbullying, hate speech, and scapegoating. In online contexts, aggressive behavior may be more frequent than in face-to-face interaction, which can poison the social climates within online communities. The last few years have seen a surge in such abusive online behavior, leaving governments, social media platforms, and individuals struggling to deal with the consequences.

For instance, in 2015, Twitter’s CEO publicly admitted that online abuse on their platform was resulting in users leaving the platform, and in some cases even having to leave their homes. More recently, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft pledged to remove hate speech from their platforms within 24 hours in accordance with the EU commission code of conduct and face fines of up to €50M in Germany if they systematically fail to remove abusive content within 24 hours. While governance demands the ability to respond quickly and at scale, we do not yet have effective human or technical processes that can address this need. Abusive language can often be extremely subtle and highly context dependent. Thus we are challenged to develop scalable computational methods that can reliably and efficiently detect and mitigate the use of abusive language online within variable and evolving contexts.

As a field that works directly with computational analysis of language, NLP (Natural Language Processing) is in a unique position to address this problem. Recently there have been a greater number of papers dealing with abusive language in the computational linguistics community. Abusive language is not a stable or simple target: misclassification of regular conversation as abusive can severely impact users’ freedom of expression and reputation, while misclassification of abusive conversations as unproblematic on the other hand maintains the status quo of online communities as unsafe environments. Clearly, there is still a great deal of work to be done in this area. More practically, as research into detecting abusive language is still in its infancy, the research community has yet to agree upon a suitable typology of abusive content as well as upon standards and metrics for proper evaluation, where research in media studies, rhetorical analysis, and cultural analysis can offer many insights.

In this second edition of this workshop, we continue to emphasize the computational detection of abusive language as informed by interdisciplinary scholarship and community experience. We invite paper submissions describing unpublished work from relevant fields including, but not limited to: natural language processing, law, psychology, network analysis, gender and women’s studies, and critical race theory.

Paper Topics
We invite long and short papers on any of the following general topics:

• related to developing computational models and systems:
• NLP models and methods for detecting abusive language online, including, but not limited to hate speech, cyberbullying etc.
• Application of NLP tools to analyze social media content and other large data sets
• NLP models for cross-lingual abusive language detection
• Computational models for multi-modal abuse detection
• Development of corpora and annotation guidelines
• Critical algorithm studies with a focus on abusive language moderation technology
• Human-Computer Interaction for abusive language detection systems
• Best practices for using NLP techniques in watchdog settings
• or related to legal, social, and policy considerations of abusive language online:
• The social and personal consequences of being the target of abusive language and targeting others with abusive language
• Assessment of current non-NLP methods of addressing abusive language
• Legal ramifications of measures taken against abusive language use
• Social implications of monitoring and moderating unacceptable content
• Considerations of implemented and proposed policies for dealing with abusive language online and the technological means of dealing with it.

In addition, in this one-day workshop, we will have

1. a multidisciplinary panel discussion and
2. a forum for plenary discussion on the issues that researchers and practitioners face in efforts to work with abusive language detection and finally
3. selected submissions from the workshop will be published in a special issue in the journal First Monday.

We seek to have a large focus on policy aspects of online abuse through invited speakers and panels.

Unshared task
In order to encourage focused contributions, we encourage researchers to consider using one or more of the following datasets in their experiments:

• StackOverflow Offensive Comments [Access from workshop webpage]
• Yahoo News Dataset of User Comments [Nobata et al., WWW 2016]
• Twitter Data Set [Waseem and Hovy, NAACL 2016]
• German Twitter Data Set [Ross et al. NLP4CMC 2016]
• Greek News Data Set [Pavlopoulos et al., EMNLP 2017]
• Wikimedia Toxicity Data Set [Wulczyn et al., WWW 2017]
• SFU Opinion and Comment Corpus [Kolhatkar et al., In Review]
• Conversations Gone Awry [Zhang et al., ACL 2018]

Submission Information
We will be using the EMNLP 2018 Submission Guidelines. Authors are invited to submit a full paper of up to 8 pages of content with up to 2 additional pages for references. We also invite short papers of up to 4 pages of content, including 2 additional pages for references.
Accepted papers will be given an additional page of content to address reviewer comments. We also invite papers which describe systems. If you would like to present a demo in addition to presenting the paper, please make sure to select either "full paper + demo" or "short paper + demo" under "Submission Category" in the START submission page.

Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The submissions will be reviewed by the program committee. As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...".

We have also included conflict of interest in the submission form. You should mark all potential reviewers who have been authors on the paper, are from the same research group or institution, or who have seen versions of this paper or discussed it with you.

We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions.

Important Dates

• Submission due: July 27, 2018
• Author Notification: August 18, 2018
• Camera Ready: August 31, 2018
• Workshop Date: Oct 31st or Nov 1st, 2018
• Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/ALW2/

Organizing Committee

• Darja Fišer, University of Ljubljana & the Jožef Stefan Institute
• Ruihong Huang, Texas A&M University
• Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Stanford University
• Rob Voigt, Stanford University
• Zeerak Waseem, University of Sheffield
• Jacqueline Wernimont, Arizona State University

Program Committee/Reviewers
The following researchers have agreed to serve on the program committee as reviewers.

• Mark Alfano, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
• Natalie Alkiaviadou, UCLAN, Cyprus, Cyprus
• Ion Androutsopoulos, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
• Veronika Bajt, Peace Institute, Slovenia
• Alistar Baron, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
• Susan Benesch, Berkman Klein Center, United States of America
• Darina Benikova, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Joachim Bingel, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
• Pete Burnap, Cardiff University, United Kingdom
• Guillermo Carbonell, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Wendy Chun, Brown University, United States of America
• Isobelle Clarke, Birmingham University, United Kingdom
• Kelly Dennis, University of Connecticut, United States of America
• Guy De Pauw, Textgain, Belgium
• Mona Diab, George Washington University, United States of America
• Lucas Dixon, Jigsaw (Google), United States of America
• Nemanja Djuric, Uber, United States of America
• Marisa Duarte, Arizona State University, United States of America
• Hugo Jair Escalante, National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE), Mexico
• Björn Gambäck, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
• Lee Gillam, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
• Tassie Gnady, University of Illinois, United States of America
• Jen Golbeck, University of Maryland, United States of America
• Vojko Gorjanc, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Erica Greene, Jigsaw, United States of America
• Joris Van Hoboken, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium
• Veronique Hoste, University of Ghent, Belgium
• Dirk Hovy, Bocconi University, Italy
• Dan Jurafsky, Stanford, United States of America
• George Kennedy, Intel, United States of America
• Neža Kogovšek Šalomon, Peace Institute, Slovenia
• Varada Kolhatkar, University of Toronto, Canada
• Els Lefever, University of Ghent, Belgium
• Chuan-Jie Lin, National Taiwan Ocean University, Taiwan
• Elizabeth Losh, William and Mary, United States of America
• Prodromos Malakasiotis, StrainTek, Greece
• Shervin Malmasi, Harvard University, United States of America
• Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
• Kathleen McKoewn, Columbia University, United States of America
• Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan, United States of America
• Mainack Mondal, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany
• Hamdy Mubarak, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
• Smruthi Mukund, A9.com Inc, United States of America
• Kevin Munger, New York University, United States of America
• Andreas Musolff, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
• Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
• Anne Brigitta Nilsen, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway
• Chikashi Nobata, Apple, United States of America
• John Pavlopoulos, StrainTek, Greece
• Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro, Bloomberg, United States of America
• Michal Ptaszynski, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Srividya Ramasubramanian, Texas A&M University, United States of America
• Georg Rehm, Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, Germany
• Björn Ross, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Masoud Rouhizadeh, Stony Brook University & University of Pennsylvania, United States of America
• Niloofar Safi Samghabadi, University of Houston, United States of America
• Christina Sauper, Facebook, United States of America
• Xanda Schofield, Cornell, United States of America
• Caroline Sinders, Wikimedia Foundation, United States of America
• Dimitris Spathis, StrainTek, Greece
• Mark Stevenson, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
• Maite Taboada, Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Dennis Yi Tenen, Columbia University, United States of America
• Ingmar Weber, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
• Amanda Williams, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
• Michael Wojatzki, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Lilja Øvrelid, University of Oslo, Norway

Related Events

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• First Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying
• The 1st Workshop on Abusive Language Online: the first edition of the workshop.
• Text Analytics for Cyber Security and Online Safety, LREC 2016
• Discourses of Aggression and Violence in Greek Digital Communication, ICGL13
• Conceptualizing, Creating, & Controlling Constructive and Controversial Comments: A CSCW Research-athon