Handling Disagreement in Hate Speech Modelling

Hate speech annotation for training machine learning models is an inherently ambiguous and subjective task. In this paper, we adopt a perspectivist approach to data annotation, model training and evaluation for hate speech classification. We first focus on the annotation process and argue that it drastically influences the final data quality. We then present three large hate speech datasets that incorporate annotator disagreement and use them to train and evaluate machine learning models. As the main point, we propose to evaluate machine learning models through the lens of disagreement by applying proper performance measures to evaluate both annotators’ agreement and models’ quality. We further argue that annotator agreement poses intrinsic limits to the performance achievable by models. When comparing models and annotators, we observed that they achieve consistent levels of agreement across datasets. We reflect upon our results and propose some methodological and ethical considerations that can stimulate the ongoing discussion on hate speech modelling and classification with disagreement.