Overview

The goal of The Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) is to advance research that develops, interrogates and applies computational methods for detecting, classifying and modelling online abuse.

WOAH 4 is colocated with the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2020. It will be held on 20th November 2020 and is entirely virtual. To attend you need to buy your ticket, which you can do on the EMNLP registration website. WOAH will be live streamed and videos will be available for you to access any time.

Early registration ends October 30 2020, 11:59 PM (EDT) with Regular tickets at $150 and Student tickets at $50. Late registration begins October 31, 2020 and remains open throughout the conference, with Regular tickets at $200 and Student tickets at $75.

You can now see the Programme for WOAH 2020 and the Programme Committee for WOAH 2020 is also available. Our original Call for Papers is here.

You can also see our 2020 Proceedings on the ACL Anthology

Background

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 (WOAH 4) we advance computational 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.

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.

WOAH 4 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.

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.