WOAH | The 4th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms

Overview

The 4th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms is colocated with the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2020. Workshops take place in the two days following the main conference and allow more specific issues to be explored in-depth. Previous iterations of WOAH have been colocated with either EMNLP or ACL (previously, the workshop was known as the Abusive Language Workshop). We have published proceedings from every iteration, which you can find on the ACL Anthology. WOAH welcomes an interdisciplinary mix of perspectives on online abuse and harm.

Digital technologies have brought myriad benefits for society, transforming how people connect, communicate and interact with each other. However, they have also enabled harmful and abusive behaviours to reach large audiences and for their negative effects to be amplified, including interpersonal aggression, bullying and hate speech. The negative effects are further compounded as marginalised and vulnerable communities are disproportionately at the risk of receiving abuse. As policymakers, civil society and tech companies devote more resources and effort to tackling online abuse, there is a pressing need for scientific research that critically and rigorously investigates how they are defined, detected, moderated and countered.

For the fourth edition of the Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (4th WOAH!) we advance research in online abuse through our theme: Social Bias and Unfairness in Online Abuse Detection. We continue to emphasize the need for inter-, cross- and anti- disciplinary work on online abuse and harms, and invite paper submissions from a range of fields. These include but are not limited to: NLP, machine learning, computational social sciences, law, politics, psychology, network analysis, sociology and cultural studies. Additionally, in this iteration we invite civil society, in particular individuals and organisations working with women and marginalised communities who are often disproportionately affected by online abuse, to submit reports, case studies, findings, data, and to record their lived experiences. We hope that through these engagements we can develop computational tools which address the issues faced by those on the front-lines of tackling online abuse.

The 4th WOAH has four components:

  1. Regular paper submissions, both short (4 pages) and long (8 pages).
  2. Submissions from civil society (5 to 20 pages). Previously published work can be accepted as a non-archival submission.
  3. Shared Exploration; to get researchers to creatively engage in the problem area.
  4. a multidisciplinary panel discussion.


Key Information

Date 20th November 2020

Location Punta Cana, Dominican Republic

Submission deadline 1st September 2020

Submission link https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2020/WOAH4

Attendance Through EMNLP, which usually have workshop-only tickets available https://2020.emnlp.org/attending

Contact You can contact the organizers at organizers [at] workshopononlineabuse [dot] com


ACL Anti-Harassment Policy

We abide by the ACL anti-harassment policy outlined here.