On Cross-Dataset Generalization in Automatic Detection of Online Abuse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
NLP research has attained high performances in abusive language detection as a supervised classification task.While in research settings, training and test datasets are usually obtained from similar data samples, in practice systems are often applied on data that are different from the training set in topic and class distributions.Also, the ambiguity in class definitions inherited in this task aggravates the discrepancies between source and target datasets.We explore the topic bias and the task formulation bias in cross-dataset generalization.We show that the benign examples in the Wikipedia Detox dataset are biased towards platformspecific topics.We identify these examples using unsupervised topic modeling and manual inspection of topics' keywords.Removing these topics increases cross-dataset generalization, without reducing in-domain classification performance.For a robust dataset design, we suggest applying inexpensive unsupervised methods to inspect the collected data and downsize the non-generalizable content before manually annotating for class labels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.046 | 0.091 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".