Polarized Opinion Detection Improves the Detection of Toxic Language

Anonymous

Abstract: Distance from unimodality (DFU) has been found to correlate well with human judgment for the assessment of polarized opinions. However, its un-normalized nature makes it less intuitive and somewhat difficult to exploit in machine learning (e.g., as a supervised signal). In this work a normalized version of this measure, called nDFU, is proposed that leads to better assessment of the degree of polarization. Then, we propose a methodology for K-class text classification, based on nDFU, that exploits polarized texts in the dataset. Such polarized instances are assigned to a separate K+1 class, so that a K+1-class classifier is trained. An empirical analysis on three datasets for abusive language detection, shows that nDFU can be used to model polarized annotations and prevent them from harming the classification performance. Finally, we further exploit nDFU to specify conditions that could explain polarization given a dimension and present text examples that polarized the annotators when the dimension was gender and race.

Paper Type: long

Research Area: Machine Learning for NLP

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Theory

Languages Studied: English

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