Hateful Word in Context Classification

Hate speech detection is a prevalent research field, yet it remains underexplored at the level of word meaning. This is significant, as terms used to convey hate often involve non-standard or novel usages which might be overlooked by commonly leveraged LMs trained on general language use. In this paper, we introduce the Hateful Word in Context Classification (HateWiC) task and present a dataset of 4000 WiC-instances, each labeled by three annotators. Our analyses and computational exploration focus on the interplay between the subjective nature (context-dependent connotations) and the descriptive nature (as described in dictionary definitions) of hateful word senses. HateWiC annotations confirm that hatefulness of a word in context does not always derive from the sense definition alone. We explore the prediction of both majority and individual annotator labels, and we experiment with modeling context- and sense-based inputs. Our findings indicate that including definitions proves effective overall, yet not in cases where hateful connotations vary. Conversely, including annotator demographics becomes more important for mitigating performance drop in subjective hate prediction.