Finding Authentic Counterhate Arguments: A Case Study with Public Figures

Abstract

We explore authentic counterhate arguments for online hateful content toward individuals. Previous efforts are limited to counterhate to fight against hateful content toward groups. Thus, we present a corpus of 54,816 hateful tweet-paragraph pairs, where the paragraphs are candidate counterhate arguments. The counterhate arguments are retrieved from 2,500 online articles from multiple sources. We propose a methodology that assures the authenticity of the counter argument and its specificity to the individual of interest. We show that finding arguments in online articles is an efficient alternative to counterhate generation approaches that may hallucinate unsupported arguments. We also present linguistic insights on the language used in counterhate arguments. Experimental results show promising results. It is more challenging, however, to identify counterhate arguments for hateful content toward individuals not included in the training set. ©2023 Association for Computational Linguistics.