Self-supervision and Controlling Techniques to Improve Counter Speech Generation.

Hate speech is a challenging problem in today's online social media. One of the current solutions followed by different social media platforms is detecting hate speech using human-in-the-loop approaches. After detection, they moderate such hate speech by deleting the posts or suspending the users. While this approach can be a short-term solution for reducing the spread of hate, many researchers argue that it stifles freedom of expression. An alternate strategy that does not hamper freedom of expression is counterspeech. Recently, many studies have tried to create generation models to assist counter speakers by providing counterspeech suggestions for combating the explosive proliferation of online hate. This pipeline has two major challenges 1) How to improve the performance of generation without a large-scale dataset since building the dataset is costly 2) How to add control in the counter speech generation to make it more personalized. In this paper, we present our published and proposed research aimed at solving these two challenges.