Hi, all. Jacque Wernimont ask I forward this to the list. Best, Sarah ----- Friends and colleagues - I am a member of the organizing committee for this workshop and I am particularly keen to have humanists, social scientists, and artists engaged too. If you have questions about format or any thing else related to the CfP, please feel free to contact me directly. I hope to see some of you in Brussels for this timely (feels sadly evergreen) event! ALW2: 2nd Workshop on Abusive Language Online EMNLP 2018 (Brussels, Belgium), October 31st or November 1st, 2018 Submission deadline: July 20th, 2018 Website: https://sites.google.com/view/alw2018 <https://sites.google.com/view/alw2018> Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/ALW2/ <https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/ALW2/> 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 second 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 a multidisciplinary panel discussion and a forum for plenary discussion on the issues that researchers and practitioners face in efforts to work with abusive language detection. We are also looking into the possibility of publishing a special issue journal to this iteration of the workshop. We seek to have a greater focus on policy aspects of online abuse through invited speakers and panels. Submission Information We will be using the EMNLP 2018 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. 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. Important Dates Submission due: July 20, 2018 Author Notification: August 18, 2018 Camera Ready: August 31, 2018 Workshop Date: Oct 31st or Nov 1st, 2018 Submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/ALW2/ <https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2018/ALW2/> 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 [To be released] Yahoo News Dataset of User Comments [Nobata et al., WWW 2016] 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] Organizing Committee Darja Fišer, University of Ljubljana & the Jožef Stefan Institute Ruihong Huang, Texas A&M University Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Stanford University Rob Voigt, Stanford University Zeerak Waseem, University of Sheffield Jacqueline Wernimont, Arizona State University Program Committee/Reviewers The following researchers have agreed to serve on the program committee as reviewers. Mark Alfano, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands Natalie Alkiaviadou, UCLAN, Cyprus, Cyprus Ion Androutsopoulos, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece Veronika Bajt, Peace Institute, Slovenia Alistar Baron, Lancaster University, United Kingdom Susan Benesch, Berkman Klein Center, United States of America Darina Benikova, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Joachim Bingel, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom Pete Burnap, Cardiff University, United Kingdom Guillermo Carbonell, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany Wendy Chun, Brown University, United States of America Isobelle Clarke, Birmingham University, United Kingdom Kelly Dennis, University of Connecticut, United States of America Guy De Pauw, Textgain, Belgium Mona Diab, George Washington University, United States of America Lucas Dixon, Jigsaw (Google), United States of America Nemanja Djuric, Uber, United States of America Marisa Duarte, Arizona State University, United States of America Hugo Jair Escalante, National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE), Mexico Björn Gambäck, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway Lee Gillam, University of Surrey, United Kingdom Tassie Gnady, University of Illinois, United States of America Jen Golbeck, University of Maryland, United States of America Vojko Gorjanc, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Erica Greene, Jigsaw, United States of America Joris Van Hoboken, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium Veronique Hoste, University of Ghent, Belgium Dirk Hovy, Bocconi University, Italy Dan Jurafsky, Stanford, United States of America George Kennedy, Intel, United States of America Neža Kogovšek Šalomon, Peace Institute, Slovenia Varada Kolhatkar, University of Toronto, Canada Els Lefever, University of Ghent, Belgium Chuan-Jie Lin, National Taiwan Ocean University, Taiwan Elizabeth Losh, William and Mary, United States of America Prodromos Malakasiotis, StrainTek, Greece Shervin Malmasi, Harvard University, United States of America Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom Kathleen McKoewn, Columbia University, United States of America Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan, United States of America Mainack Mondal, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany Hamdy Mubarak, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar Smruthi Mukund, A9.com Inc, United States of America Kevin Munger, New York University, United States of America Andreas Musolff, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar Anne Brigitta Nilsen, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway Chikashi Nobata, Apple, United States of America John Pavlopoulos, StrainTek, Greece Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro, Bloomberg, United States of America Michal Ptaszynski, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Srividya Ramasubramanian, Texas A&M University, United States of America Georg Rehm, Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, Germany Björn Ross, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Masoud Rouhizadeh, Stony Brook University & University of Pennsylvania, United States of America Niloofar Safi Samghabadi, University of Houston, United States of America Christina Sauper, Facebook, United States of America Xanda Schofield, Cornell, United States of America Caroline Sinders, Wikimedia Foundation, United States of America Dimitris Spathis, StrainTek, Greece Mark Stevenson, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom Maite Taboada, Simon Fraser University, Canada Dennis Yi Tenen, Columbia University, United States of America Ingmar Weber, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar Amanda Williams, University of Bristol, United Kingdom Michael Wojatzki, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Lilja Øvrelid, University of Oslo, Norway Related Events Workshop: The turn to artificial intelligence in governing communication online First Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying The 1st Workshop on Abusive Language Online: the first edition of the workshop. CHI Workshop on Online Harassment: a workshop focused on developing datasets for researching online harassment Text Analytics for Cyber Security and Online Safety, LREC 2016 Discourses of Aggression and Violence in Greek Digital Communication, ICGL13 Conceptualizing, Creating, & Controlling Constructive and Controversial Comments: A CSCW Research-athon Jacqueline Wernimont, Ph.D. Director, Nexus: A Digital Research Co-Op Co-Director HASTAC <https://www.hastac.org/> Co-Director, Human Security Collaboratory <http://hscollab.org/> Assistant Professor, Department of English Affiliate Faculty: School for Social Transformation School for Film, Theater, and Dance School for Future of Innovation in Society https://jwernimont.com/ <https://jwernimont.com/> | @profwernimont