PerspectiveMod: A Perspectivist Resource for Deliberative Moderation

Human moderators in online discussions face a heterogeneous range of tasks, which go beyond content moderation, or policing. They also support and improve discussion quality, which is challenging to model (and evaluate) in NLP due to its inherent subjectivity and the scarcity of annotated resources. We address this gap by introducing PerspectiveMod, a dataset of online comments annotated for the question: "Does this comment require moderation, and why?" Annotations were collected from both expert moderators and trained nonexperts. PerspectiveMod is unique in its intentional variation across (a) the level of moderation experience embedded in the source data (professional vs. non-professional moderation environments), (b) the annotator profiles (experts vs. trained crowdworkers), and (c) the richness of each moderation judgment, both in terms on fine-grained comment properties (drawn from argumentation and deliberative theory) and in the representation of the individuality of the annotator (socio-demographics and attitudes towards the task). We advance understanding of the task's complexity by providing interpretation layers that account for its subjectivity. Our statistical analysis highlights the value of collecting annotator perspectives, including their experiences, attitudes, and views on AI, as a foundation for developing more context-aware and interpretively robust moderation tools.