Call for Participation - Multilingual Detection of Hate Speech Against Immigrants and Women in Twitter

Call for Participation

SemEval 2019 Task 5 - hatEval: Multilingual Detection of Hate Speech
Against Immigrants and Women in Twitter
Shared Task Website: https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/19935 <https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/19935>

Hate Speech is commonly defined as any communication that disparages a
person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race,
color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion,
or other characteristics. Given the huge amount of user-generated
contents on the Web, and in particular on social media, the problem of
detecting, and therefore possibly limit the Hate Speech diffusion, is
becoming fundamental, for instance for fighting against misogyny and
xenophobia.

The proposed task consists in Hate Speech detection in Twitter but
featured by two specific different targets, immigrants and women, in a
multilingual perspective, for Spanish and English.
The task will be articulated around two related subtasks for each of
the involved languages: a basic task about Hate Speech, and another
one where fine-grained features of hateful contents will be
investigated in order to understand how existing approaches may deal
with the identification of especially dangerous forms of hate, i.e.
those where the incitement is against an individual rather than
against a group of people, and where an aggressive behavior of the
author can be identified as a prominent feature of the expression of
hate. Participants will be asked to identify, on the one hand, if the
target of hate is a single human or a group of persons, on the other
hand, if the message author intends to be aggressive, harmful, or even
to incite, in various forms, to violent acts against the target.

TASK A - Hate Speech Detection against Immigrants and Women: a
two-class (or binary) classification where
systems have to predict whether a tweet in English or in Spanish with
a given target (women or immigrants) is hateful or not hateful.

TASK B - Aggressive behavior and Target Classification: where systems
are asked first to classify hateful tweets for English and Spanish
(e.g., tweets where Hate Speech against women or immigrants has been
identified) as aggressive or not aggressive, and second to identify
the target harassed as individual or generic (i.e. single human or
group).

Important dates

January 10 2019: Test dataset is released and evaluation begins
January 20 2019: Evaluation ends
February 05 2019: Results are notified to participants
February 28 2019: System and Task description paper submission due
March 14 2019: Paper reviews due
April 06 2019: Author notifications
April 20 2019: Camera ready submissions due
June 6-7 2019: SemEval co-located with NAACL-HLT 2019 in Minneapolis, USA

Task Organizers

Viviana Patti, Cristina Bosco, Valerio Basile, Manuela Sanguinetti
Università degli Studi di Torino, Turin (Italy)

Elisabetta Fersini, Debora Nozza
Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Milan (Italy)

Francisco Rangel
Autoritas Consulting S.A., Valencia (Spain)

Paolo Rosso
Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia (Spain)