Kevin Coe


2020

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Fine-tuning for multi-domain and multi-label uncivil language detection
Kadir Bulut Ozler | Kate Kenski | Steve Rains | Yotam Shmargad | Kevin Coe | Steven Bethard
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms

Incivility is a problem on social media, and it comes in many forms (name-calling, vulgarity, threats, etc.) and domains (microblog posts, online news comments, Wikipedia edits, etc.). Training machine learning models to detect such incivility must handle the multi-label and multi-domain nature of the problem. We present a BERT-based model for incivility detection and propose several approaches for training it for multi-label and multi-domain datasets. We find that individual binary classifiers outperform a joint multi-label classifier, and that simply combining multiple domains of training data outperforms other recently-proposed fine tuning strategies. We also establish new state-of-the-art performance on several incivility detection datasets.

2019

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Incivility Detection in Online Comments
Farig Sadeque | Stephen Rains | Yotam Shmargad | Kate Kenski | Kevin Coe | Steven Bethard
Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019)

Incivility in public discourse has been a major concern in recent times as it can affect the quality and tenacity of the discourse negatively. In this paper, we present neural models that can learn to detect name-calling and vulgarity from a newspaper comment section. We show that in contrast to prior work on detecting toxic language, fine-grained incivilities like namecalling cannot be accurately detected by simple models like logistic regression. We apply the models trained on the newspaper comments data to detect uncivil comments in a Russian troll dataset, and find that despite the change of domain, the model makes accurate predictions.