{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/ex-machina-personal-attacks-seen-at-scale","title":"Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale","arxiv_id":"1610.08914","date":"2016-10-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ellery Wulczyn","Nithum Thain","Lucas Dixon"],"abstract":"The damage personal attacks cause to online discourse motivates many\nplatforms to try to curb the phenomenon. However, understanding the prevalence\nand impact of personal attacks in online platforms at scale remains\nsurprisingly difficult. The contribution of this paper is to develop and\nillustrate a method that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to analyze\npersonal attacks at scale. We show an evaluation method for a classifier in\nterms of the aggregated number of crowd-workers it can approximate. We apply\nour methodology to English Wikipedia, generating a corpus of over 100k high\nquality human-labeled comments and 63M machine-labeled ones from a classifier\nthat is as good as the aggregate of 3 crowd-workers, as measured by the area\nunder the ROC curve and Spearman correlation. Using this corpus of\nmachine-labeled scores, our methodology allows us to explore some of the open\nquestions about the nature of online personal attacks. This reveals that the\nmajority of personal attacks on Wikipedia are not the result of a few malicious\nusers, nor primarily the consequence of allowing anonymous contributions from\nunregistered users.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08914v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08914v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"ex-machina-personal-attacks-seen-at-scale","repo_url":"https://github.com/ewulczyn/wiki-detox","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}},{"paper_slug":"ex-machina-personal-attacks-seen-at-scale","repo_url":"https://github.com/anandborad/Comment-Toxicity-Hate-Speech-Detection","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}},{"paper_slug":"ex-machina-personal-attacks-seen-at-scale","repo_url":"https://github.com/sociam/liketrainer","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"wikidetox","name":"WikiDetox","full_name":"Wikipedia Detox"}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1610.08914","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}