SALT-NLP/silent_signals

Silent Signals

A dataset of dogwhistle use cases in informal and formal discourse. A dogwhistle is a form of coded communication that carries a secondary meaning to specific audiences and is often weaponized for racial and socioeconomic discrimination. Dog whistling historically originated from United States politics, but in recent years has taken root in social media as a means of evading hate speech detection systems and maintaining plausible deniability.

We developed an approach for word-sense disambiguation of dogwhistles from standard speech using Large Language Models (LLMs), and leveraged this technique to create a dataset of 16,550 high-confidence coded examples of dogwhistles used in formal and informal communication. Silent Signals is the largest dataset of disambiguated dogwhistle usage, created for applications in hate speech detection, neology, and political science.

Please note, this dataset contains content that may be upsetting or offensive to some readers.

Published at ACL 2024!

📄 Paper Link - Silent Signals, Loud Impact: LLMs for Word-Sense Disambiguation of Coded Dog Whistles
👔 Formal Potential Instance Dataset - Potential Dogwhistles from Congress
🏄‍♀️ Informal Potential Instance Dataset - Potential Dogwhistles from Reddit
🔍 Detection Evaluation Set - Human-Annotated Evaluation set for Dogwhistle Detection
🧩 Disambiguation Evaluation Set - Human-Annotated Evaluation set for Dogwhistle Disambiguation
💻 Dataset webpage - Coming soon 🚀

Dataset Schema

Field Name	Type	Example	Description
dog_whistle	str	"illegals"	Dogwhistle word or term.
dog_whistle_root	str	"illegal immigrant"	The root form of the dogwhistle, as there could be multiple variations.
ingroup	str	"anti-Latino"	The community that uses the dogwhistle.
content	str	"In my State of Virginia, the governor put a stop to the independent audits that were finding thousands of illegals on the roll."	Text containing the dogwhistle.
date	str	"11/14/2016"	Date of comment, formatted as mm/dd/yyyy.
speaker	str	None	Speaker, included for U.S. Congressional speech excerpts and Null for Reddit comments.
chamber	str	None	Chamber of Congress, 'S' for Senate, 'H' for House of Representatives, and Null for Reddit comments.
subreddit	str	"The_Donald"	Subreddit where the comment was posted, Null for Congressional data.
source	str	"PRAW API"	The source or method of data collection.
definition	str	"Latino, especially Mexican, immigrants regardless of documentation."	Definition of the dogwhistle, sourced from the Allen AI Dog Whistle Glossary.
type	str	"Informal"	Type of content, formal or informal.
party	str	None	The political party affiliation of the speaker, available only for U.S. Congressional excerpts.

NOTE: The dogwhistles terms and definitions that enabled this research and data collection were sourced from the Allen AI Dogwhistle Glossary.

Citations

MLA

Julia Kruk, Michela Marchini, Rijul Magu, Caleb Ziems, David Muchlinski, and Diyi Yang. 2024. Silent Signals, Loud Impact: LLMs for Word-Sense Disambiguation of Coded Dog Whistles. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12493–12509, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{kruk-etal-2024-silent,
    title = "Silent Signals, Loud Impact: {LLM}s for Word-Sense Disambiguation of Coded Dog Whistles",
    author = "Kruk, Julia  and
      Marchini, Michela  and
      Magu, Rijul  and
      Ziems, Caleb  and
      Muchlinski, David  and
      Yang, Diyi",
    editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Srikumar, Vivek",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.675",
    pages = "12493--12509",
    abstract = "A dog whistle is a form of coded communication that carries a secondary meaning to specific audiences and is often weaponized for racial and socioeconomic discrimination. Dog whistling historically originated from United States politics, but in recent years has taken root in social media as a means of evading hate speech detection systems and maintaining plausible deniability. In this paper, we present an approach for word-sense disambiguation of dog whistles from standard speech using Large Language Models (LLMs), and leverage this technique to create a dataset of 16,550 high-confidence coded examples of dog whistles used in formal and informal communication. Silent Signals is the largest dataset of disambiguated dog whistle usage, created for applications in hate speech detection, neology, and political science.",
}