Hate Speech and Topic Shift in the Covid-19 Public Discourse on Social Media in Italy

Abstract

The eighth edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2021) was held at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca from 26th to 28th January 2022.After the edition of 2020, which was held in fully virtual mode due to the health emergency related to Covid-19, CLiC-it 2021 represented the first moment for the Italian research community of Computational Linguistics to meet in person after more than one year of full/partial lockdown. Although the conference was held in dual mode, we strongly suggested the participants to attend it coming to Milan. Indeed, we received a strong feedback on this aspect from the community, which was eager to meet in person and enjoy both the scientific and social events together with the colleagues. In total, 99 participants registered to the conference benefiting from the early registration fee, 91 out of which expressed their intention to attend the event in person, which we consider as a very positive indication of enthusiasm from the community, given the uncertain situation due to the evolution of the pandemic in Italy.In total, we received 68 proposals, organized in the following specific tracks: Information Extraction,

Hate Speech in the Comments’ Column Instagram: A Discourse Analysis

“…The newly created datasets on offensive content, hate speech, and cyberbullying cover a wide range of non-English languages such as Arabic (Aldjanabi et al, 2021;Aljarah et al, 2021;Alshalan et al, 2020;Awane et al, 2021), Polish (Adamczak-Krysztofowicz & Szczepaniak-Kozak, 2017Habrat, 2021), Spanish (Arango et al, 2020;García-Díaz et al, 2022;Uzan & HaCohen-Kerner, 2021), Italian (Caiani et al, 2021;Celli et al, 2021;Florio et al, 2021), and Chinese (Chen, 2022;Uyheng et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2022). Therefore, it would be fruitful to examine social media as a forum for the propagation of hate speech.…”