Distilling Implied Bias from Hate Speech for Counter Narrative Selection

Hate speech is a critical problem in our society and social media platforms are often an amplifier for this phenomenon. Recently the use of Counter Narratives (informative and non-aggressive responses) has been proposed as a viable solution to counter hateful content that goes beyond simple detection-removal strategies. In this paper we present a novel approach along this line of research, which utilizes the implied statement (bias) expressed in the hate speech to retrieve an appropriate counter narrative. To this end, we first trained and tested several LMs that, given a hateful post, generate the underlying bias and the target group. Then, for the counter narrative selection task, we experimented with several methodologies that either use or not use the implied bias during the process. Experiments show that using the target group information allows the system to better focus on relevant content and that implied statement for selecting counter narratives is better than the corresponding standard approach that does not use it. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to build an automatic selection tool that uses hate speech implied bias to drive Counter Narrative selection.