2023/11/29 by Sabit Hassan, Hassan, Sabit, Malihe Alikhani +1 · 3 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Social Media and Politics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.18147
openalex publication_date 2023/11/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Counterspeech can be an effective method for battling hateful content on social media. Automated counterspeech generation can aid in this process. Generated counterspeech, however, can be viable only when grounded in the context of topic, audience and sensitivity as these factors influence both the efficacy and appropriateness. In this work, we propose a novel framework based on theories of discourse to study the inferential links that connect counter speeches to the hateful comment. Within this framework, we propose: i) a taxonomy of counterspeech derived from discourse frameworks, and ii) discourse-informed prompting strategies for generating contextually-grounded counterspeech. To construct and validate this framework, we present a process for collecting an in-the-wild dataset of counterspeech from Reddit. Using this process, we manually annotate a dataset of 3.9k Reddit comment pairs for the presence of hatespeech and counterspeech. The positive pairs are annotated for 10 classes in our proposed taxonomy. We annotate these pairs with paraphrased counterparts to remove offensiveness and first-person references. We show that by using our dataset and framework, large language models can generate contextually-grounded counterspeech informed by theories of discourse. According to our human evaluation, our approaches can act as a safeguard against critical failures of discourse-agnostic models.