Controversy and Conformity: from Generalized to Personalized Aggressiveness Detection

Abstract

There is content such as hate speech, offensive, toxic or aggressive documents, which are perceived differently by their consumers. They are commonly identified using classifiers solely based on textual content that generalize pre-agreed meanings of difficult problems. Such models provide the same results for each user, which leads to high misclassification rate observable especially for contentious, aggressive documents. Both document controversy and user nonconformity require new solutions. Therefore, we propose novel personalized approaches that respect individual beliefs expressed by either user conformity-based measures or various embeddings of their previous text annotations. We found that only a few annotations of most controversial documents are enough for all our personalization methods to significantly outperform classic, generalized solutions. The more controversial the content, the greater the gain. The personalized solutions may be used to efficiently filter unwanted aggressive content in the way adjusted to a given person.