3rd Workshop on Abusive Language Online

**** Extended submission deadline ***

ALW3: 3rd Workshop on Abusive Language Online
ACL 2019 (Florence, Italy), August 01 or 02, 2019
Updated Submission deadline: May 3, 2019
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/alw3
Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/alw/

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 third 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

We seek to have a greater focus on content moderation 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
• 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]

Submission Information
We will be using the ACL 2019 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. We also invite abstract submissions of up to 2 pages of content, including 1 additional page 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: https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/alw/

Important Dates
Submission due: April 25, 2019
Author Notification: May 17, 2019
Camera Ready: May 29, 2019
Workshop Date: Aug 01 or 02, 2019

Organizing Committee
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Stanford University
Sarah T. Roberts, University of California, Los Angeles
Joel Tetreault, Grammarly
Zeerak Waseem, University of Sheffield

Program Committee/Reviewers

• Tunde Adefioye, KVS, Belgium
• Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar, Columbia University, United States
• Mark Alfano, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
• Hind Almerekhi, Qatar Foundation, Qatar
• Jisun An, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar
• Ion Androutsopoulos, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
• Pinkesh Badjatiya, International Institute of Information TechnologyHyderabad, India
• Renata Barreto, Berkeley Law, United States
• Elizabeth Belding, UC Santa Barbara, United States
• Joachim Bingel, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Peter Bourgonje, Potsdam University, Germany
• Anne Brigitta Nilsen, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
• Andrew Caines, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
• Pedro Calais, UFMG, Brazil, Brazil
• Michael Castelle, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
• Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
• Jonathan P. Chang, Cornell University, United States
• Wendy Chun, Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Isobelle Clarke, Aston University, United Kingdom
• Montse Cuadros, Vicomtech, Spain
• Tyrus Cukavac, Bloomberg, United States
• Aron Culotta, Illinois Institute of Technology, United States
• Kareem Darwish, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar Foundation, Qatar
• Thomas Davidson, Cornell University, United States
• Ona de Gibert Bonet, University of the Basque Country, Spain
• Kelly Dennis, University of Connecticut, United States
• Lucas Dixon, Jigsaw/Google, United States
• Nemanja Djuric, Uber ATG, United States
• Jacob Eisenstein, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
• Mai ElSherief, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States
• Elisabetta Fersini, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
• Darja Fišer, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Paula Fortuna, INESC TEC, Portugal
• Maya Ganesh, Leuphana University, Germany
• Sara E. Garza, FIME-UANL, Mexico
• Ryan Georgi, University of Washington, United States
• Tanton Gibbs, Facebook, United States
• Lee Gillam, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
• Tonei Glavinic, Dangerous Speech Project, Spain
• Vojko Gorjanc, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Genevieve Gorrell, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
• Erica Greene, The New York Times, United States
• Alex Hanna, Google, United States
• Mareike Hartmann, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Christopher Homan, Rochester Institute of Technology, United States
• Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
• Hossein Hosseini, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, United States
• Veronique Hoste, Ghent University, Belgium
• Ruihong Huang, Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, United States
• Tim Isbister, FOI, Swedish Defence Research Agency, Sweden
• Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University, United States
• Nishant Kambhatla, Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Mladen Karan, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia, Croatia
• Anna Kasunic, Carnegie Mellon University, United States
• Christian Katzenbach, Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Germany
• George Kennedy, Intel, United States
• Ralf Krestel, Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany
• Rohan Kshirsagar, Columbia University, United States
• Haewoon Kwak, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar
• Els Lefever, LT3, Ghent University, Belgium
• Nikola Ljubešić, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
• Elizabeth Losh, William and Mary, United States
• Walid Magdy, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
• Rijul Magu, Conduent, United States
• Prodromos Malakasiotis, Athens University of Economics and Business Informatics Department, Greece
• Shervin Malmasi, Harvard Medical School, United States
• Puneet Mathur, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, India
• Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
• Yashar Mehdad, Airbnb, United States
• Tilo Mentler, University of Lübeck, Germany
• Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan, United States
• Pushkar Mishra, Facebook, United Kingdom
• Mainack Mondal, Cornell Tech, United States
• Hamdy Mubarak, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar Foundation, Qatar
• Smruthi Mukund, Amazon, United States
• Smaranda Muresan, Columbia University, United States
• Isar Nejadgholi, Researcher, Canada
• Iva Nenadic, Research Associate, Italy
• Chikashi Nobata, Apple Inc., United States
• Gustavo Henrique Paetzold, Federal University of Technology, Brazil
• Alexis Palmer, University of North Texas, United States
• Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
• John Pavlopoulos, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
• Matúš Pikuliak, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia
• Christopher Potts, Stanford University, United States
• Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro, Bloomberg, United States
• Michal Ptaszynski, Kitami Institute of Technology, Japan
• Jacek Pyżalski, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland
• Georg Rehm, DFKI, Germany
• Julian Risch, Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany
• Melissa Robinson, University of North Texas, United States
• Carolyn Rose, Carnegie Mellon University, United States
• Björn Ross, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
• Masoud Rouhizadeh, Johns Hopkins University, United States
• Niloofar Safi Samghabadi, University of Houston, United States
• Magnus Sahlgren, RISE SICS, Sweden
• Christina Sauper, Facebook, United States
• Ramit Sawhney, Multimodal Digital Media Analysis Lab - IIIT-Delhi, India
• Tyler Schnoebelen, Decoded AI, United States
• Alexandra Schofield, Cornell University, United States
• Sima Sharifirad, Dalhousie university, Canada
• Qinlan Shen, Carnegie Mellon University, United States
• Manish Shrivastava, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, India
• Marian Simko, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia
• Caroline Sinders, Convocation Design + Research, United States
• Vinay Singh, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India
• Jeffrey Sorensen, Jigsaw, United States
• Rachele Sprugnoli, FBK / University of Trento, Italy
• Sajedul Talukder, Florida International University, United States
• Linnet Taylor, Tilburg University, Netherlands
• Achint Thomas, Embibe, India
• Sara Tonelli, FBK, Italy
• Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis, University of York, United Kingdom
• Betty van Aken, Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin, Germany
• Joris Van Hoboken, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
• Anna Vartapetiance, Surrey Centre for Cyber Security / University of Surrey, United Kingdom
• Erik Velldal, University of Oslo, Norway
• Deepanshu Vijay, Goldman Sachs, India
• Rob Voigt, Stanford University, United States
• Cindy Wang, Stanford University, United States
• Ingmar Weber, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
• Jacque Wernimont, Arizona State University, United States
• Michael Wojatzki, Language Technology Lab, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Helen Yannakoudakis, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
• Mahsa Yarmohammadi, Johns Hopkins University, United States
• Seunghyun Yoon, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea
• Aleš Završnik, Institute of criminology at the Faculty of Law Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Torsten Zesch, Language Technology Lab, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Jan Šnajder, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia
• Andrej Švec, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia