News/Research

Claudia von Vacano on AI that Recognizes Hate Speech

15 Aug, 2018

Claudia von Vacano on AI that Recognizes Hate Speech

We're so incredibly proud of the work executive committee member Claudia von Vacano does with Digital Humanities at Berkeley and the D-Lab, and she's receiving some well-deserved publicity from Cronkite News, a division of Arizona PBS. Their article "Can artificial intelligence recognize hate speech? Cal-Berkeley researchers think so" details the work that Claudia and the D-Lab team have done in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League in developing an Online Hate Index.

From the article:

“Going into the project,” Von Vacano said, “we kind of naïvely thought that we could ingest large amounts of text and, at the other end, say on a binary level ‘This is hate … this is not hate.’

“At this point, we have a much more sophisticated understanding of hate speech as a linguistic phenomenon, and we are really dissecting hate speech as a construct with multiple components.”

Read the full article here.