Silent Signals, Loud Impact: LLMs for Word-Sense Disambiguation of Coded Dog Whistles
A dog whistle is a form of coded communication that carries a secondary meaning to specific audiences and is often weaponized for racial and socioeconomic discrimination. Dog whistling historically originated from United States politics, but in recent years has taken root in social media as a means...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
10-06-2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | A dog whistle is a form of coded communication that carries a secondary
meaning to specific audiences and is often weaponized for racial and
socioeconomic discrimination. Dog whistling historically originated from United
States politics, but in recent years has taken root in social media as a means
of evading hate speech detection systems and maintaining plausible deniability.
In this paper, we present an approach for word-sense disambiguation of dog
whistles from standard speech using Large Language Models (LLMs), and leverage
this technique to create a dataset of 16,550 high-confidence coded examples of
dog whistles used in formal and informal communication. Silent Signals is the
largest dataset of disambiguated dog whistle usage, created for applications in
hate speech detection, neology, and political science.
The dataset can be found at
https://huggingface.co/datasets/SALT-NLP/silent_signals. |
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| DOI: | 10.48550/arxiv.2406.06840 |