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Lower Bias, Higher Density Abusive Language Datasets: A Recipe

Datasets to train models for abusive language detection are at the same time necessary and still scarce. One the reasons for their limited availability is the cost of their creation. It is not only that manual annotation is expensive, it is also the case that the phenomenon is sparse, causing human annotators having to go through a large number of irrelevant examples in order to obtain some significant data. Strategies used until now to increase density of abusive language and obtain more meaningful data overall, include data filtering on the basis of pre-selected keywords and hate-rich sources of data. We suggest a recipe that at the same time can provide meaningful data with possibly higher density of abusive language and also reduce top-down biases imposed by corpus creators in the selection of the data to annotate. More specifically, we exploit the controversy channel on Reddit to obtain keywords that are used to filter a Twitter dataset. While the method needs further validation and refinement, our preliminary experiments show a higher density of abusive tweets in the filtered vs unfiltered dataset, and a more meaningful topic distribution after filtering.