NoisyHate: Mining Online Human-Written Perturbations for Realistic Robustness Benchmarking of Content Moderation Models

Abstract

Online texts with toxic content are a clear threat to the users on social media in particular and society in general. Although many platforms have adopted various measures (e.g., machine learning-based hate-speech detection systems) to diminish their effect, toxic content writers have also attempted to evade such measures by using cleverly modified toxic words, so-called human-written text perturbations. Therefore, to help build automatic detection tools to recognize those perturbations, prior methods have developed sophisticated techniques to generate diverse adversarial samples. However, we note that these ``algorithms"-generated perturbations do not necessarily capture all the traits of ``human"-written perturbations. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel, high-quality dataset of human-written perturbations, named as NoisyHate, that was created from real-life perturbations that are both written and verified by human-in-the-loop. We show that perturbations in NoisyHate have different characteristics than prior algorithm-generated toxic datasets show, and thus can be in particular useful to help develop better toxic speech detection solutions. We thoroughly validate NoisyHate against state-of-the-art language models, such as BERT and RoBERTa, and black box APIs, such as Perspective API, on two tasks, such as perturbation normalization and understanding.