A Framework for Political Portmanteau Decomposition

Nabil Hossain, Minh Tran, Henry Kautz

Paper type: Poster

Keywords: building, detection, hate speech, linguistic, political, spread, terms, traditional, words

2020-06-10 P8 (22:00-23:00 GMT) [Zoom] [Cal]

Abstract: Portmanteaus are new words formed by combining the sounds and meanings of two words. Given their sticky nature, portmanteaus are often used to create political and personal attacks by combining a target entity with derogatory terms, which can then be spread online for promoting hate speech and defamation. In this paper, we present a framework to decompose political portmanteaus used online into their component words. Using our annotated dataset of political portmanteaus, we train a system that decomposes 76.2% of the political portmanteaus into their component words. Furthermore, for 93.4% of the political portmanteaus, our system finds the correct component words in its top 10 results, suggesting that using better ranking methods can lead to stronger results. This work provides a framework for both understanding an intriguing linguistic phenomena and for building hate-speech filters that could catch novel words that would bypass traditional hate speech detection approaches.

Similar Papers

The Political Dashboard: A Tool for Online Political Transparency
Juan Carlos Medina Serrano , Orestis Papakyriakopoulos , Morteza Shahrezaye , Simon Hegelich
MimicProp: Learning to Incorporate Lexicon Knowledge into Distributed Word Representation for Social Media Analysis
Muheng Yan , Yu-Ru Lin , Rebecca Hwa , Ali Mert Ertugrul , Meiqi Guo , Wen-Ting Chung
#MeTooMA: Multi-Aspect Annotations of Tweets Related to the MeToo Movement
Akash Gautam , Puneet Mathur , Rakesh Gosangi , Debanjan Mahata , Ramit Sawhney , Rajiv Ratn Shah
Characterizing User Content on a Multi-Lingual Social Network
Pushkal Agarwal , Kiran Garimella , Sagar Joglekar , Nishanth Sastry , Gareth Tyson