The DOI matches its Crossref record; 24 of the 24 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
HateCheck: Functional Tests for Hate Speech Detection Models
Open accessAbstract
Detecting online hate is a difficult task that even state-of-the-art models struggle with. Typically, hate speech detection models are evaluated by measuring their performance on held-out test data using metrics such as accuracy and F1 score. However, this approach makes it difficult to identify specific model weak points. It also risks overestimating generalisable model performance due to increasingly well-evidenced systematic gaps and biases in hate speech datasets. To enable more targeted diagnostic insights, we introduce HateCheck, a suite of functional tests for hate speech detection models. We specify 29 model functionalities motivated by a review of previous research and a series of interviews with civil society stakeholders. We craft test cases for each functionality and validate their quality through a structured annotation process. To illustrate HateCheck's utility, we test near-state-of-the-art transformer models as well as two popular commercial models, revealing critical model weaknesses.
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Cites
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019) · Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/n19-1423 · Cited by 54,325
Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria
Corbin, J. M., & Strauss, A. (1990) · Qualitative Sociology · doi:10.1007/bf00988593 · Cited by 11,133
Transformers: State-of-the-Art Natural Language Processing
Wolf, T., Debut, L., Sanh, V., Chaumond, J., Delangue, C., Moi, A., Cistac, P., Rault, T., Louf, R., Funtowicz, M., et al. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-demos.6 · Cited by 8,741
DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter
Sanh, V., Debut, L., Chaumond, J., & Wolf, T. (2019) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.01108 · Cited by 4,653
Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language
Davidson, T., Warmsley, D., Macy, M., & Weber, I. (2017) · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · doi:10.1609/icwsm.v11i1.14955 · Cited by 2,610
Grounded Theory Research: Procedures, Canons, and Evaluative Criteria
Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (1990) · Zeitschrift fur Soziologie · doi:10.1515/zfsoz-1990-0602 · Cited by 1,710 · cited 1×
“Using a grounded theory approach (Corbin and Strauss, 1990), we identified”
MethodA Survey on Automatic Detection of Hate Speech in Text
Fortuna, P., & Nunes, S. (2019) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3232676 · Cited by 1,241
Beyond accuracy: behavioral testing of NLP models with CheckList
Ribeiro, M. T., Wu, T., Guestrin, C., & Singh, S. (2020) · Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.442 · Cited by 890
Bender, E. M., & Friedman, B. (2018) · Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00041 · Cited by 854 · cited 1×
“Following Bender and Friedman (2018), we provide a data statement, which documents the generation and provenance of test cases in H ATE C HECK .”
MethodThe Risk of Racial Bias in Hate Speech Detection
Sap, M., Card, D., Gabriel, S., Choi, Y., & Smith, N. A. (2019) · Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · doi:10.18653/v1/p19-1163 · Cited by 817
Cited by
PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways
Chowdhery, A., Narang, S., Devlin, J., Bosma, M., Mishra, G., Roberts, A., Barham, P., Chung, H. W., Sutton, C., Gehrmann, S., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.02311 · Cited by 2,590
“We note that we are subject to the social bias of the Perspective API, which can assign higher toxicity to innocuous mentions of certain identity groups (Dixon et al., 2018; Röttger et al., 2021).”
BackgroundRed Teaming Language Models with Language Models
Perez, E., Huang, S., Song, F., Cai, T., Ring, R., Aslanides, J., Glaese, A., McAleese, N., & Irving, G. (2022) · Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.225 · Cited by 363
Auditing large language models: a three-layered approach
Mökander, J., Schuett, J., Kirk, H. R., & Floridi, L. (2024) · AI and Ethics · doi:10.1007/s43681-023-00289-2 · Cited by 289
ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection
Hartvigsen, T., Gabriel, S., Palangi, H., Sap, M., Ray, D., & Kamar, E. (2022) · Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.234 · Cited by 279
ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection
Hartvigsen, T., Gabriel, S., Palangi, H., Sap, M., Ray, D., & Kamar, E. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.09509 · Cited by 276
Metadata
- Authors
- Röttger, P., Vidgen, B., Nguyen, D., Waseem, Z., Margetts, H., & Pierrehumbert, J.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Published
- 2021
- Pages
- 41-58
- ISSN
- 2331-8422 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3175487198
- Cited by
- 187
- References
- 24
- Type
- posted content
- Open access
- green
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: HateCheck: Functional Tests for Hate Speech Detection Models. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.4
- The paper
- Röttger, P., Vidgen, B., Nguyen, D., Waseem, Z., Margetts, H., & Pierrehumbert, J. (2021). HateCheck: Functional Tests for Hate Speech Detection Models. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.4
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
