Author: Sara Tonelli (FBK – Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
In the week between 20 and 24 of June, FBK team members attended the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference in Marseille, France. The KID_ACTIONS project was presented on several occasions during the week. Sara Tonelli co-organised the 1st Workshop on Perspective Approaches to NLP together with Prof. Valerio Basile, a member of the KID ACTIONS lab.
The workshop aimed to address the problem of creating ‘gold standard’ data to train natural language processing systems for tasks where a ground truth may not exist, or annotators may interpret the same text in different ways. A typical example of this is datasets for online hate speech detection or cyberbullying analysis, which are generally created by asking human annotators to label a text as hateful or not. This aspect is very important also in the KID ACTIONS use cases, because teenagers may have a different perception of what is offensive or not, and interpret online attacks as more or less serious depending on their personality and background. This aspect has been considered when developing the KID ACTIONS platform, trying to grant as much flexibility as possible to participants who can choose to ask for assistance or leave the online activities whenever they do not feel comfortable.
Federico Bonetti presented the High School Superhero tool both at the main conference and at the Workshop on Games and NLP. His presentations were positively received by the audience, which appreciated the 3D design of the application, its usability and the fact that it can be easily adapted to perform different tasks and deal with texts in multiple languages.
Finally, Sara Tonelli co-organised also the Second International Workshop on Resources and Techniques for User Information in Abusive Language Analysis, again in collaboration with Prof. Valerio Basile and with the NLP Group at the University of Naples L’Orientale. The program included presentations related to abusive language and cyberbullying, as well as two invited talks by prominent scholars in the field: Walter Daelemans and Viviana Patti.
Overall, these events contributed to giving great visibility to the research activities of KID ACTIONS and disseminating its results at one of the most important NLP conferences, receiving very positive feedback from the attendees.