[Air-L] The Use of Artificial Intelligence to Address Online Bullying and Abuse

[Tijana Milosevic]

Hi Everyone,

Apologies for cross-posting, we thought the following call (please see
below) might be of interest to some of you.

Thanks in advance,

Kind regards,

Tijana

The International Journal of Bullying Prevention (IJBP), special issue:

The Use of Artificial Intelligence to Address Online Bullying and Abuse[image:
New Content Item]

Special Issue Editors:

Dr. Tijana Milosevic, The National Anti-Bullying Research and Resource
Centre, Institute of Education, Dublin City University

Dr. Kathleen Van Royen, Department of Communication Studies, University of
Antwerp

Dr. Brian Davis, School of Computing, Dublin City University and ADAPT
Research Centre

Cyberbullying or online bullying, harassment and abuse pose significant
challenges for online platforms. The use of natural language processing
(NLP), various forms of machine learning (such as supervised machine
learning, deep learning) and artificial intelligence (AI), is becoming more
prevalent in moderating these behaviours on social media platforms and
various content sharing apps. A number of social media companies refer to
their increasing reliance on AI to moderate various forms of abusive
behaviour, indicating their relative success in identifying these
proactively. Nonetheless, companies reveal little information about how
such moderation is applied in practice, about the details behind the
algorithm design; and they infrequently release datasets that would allow
scientists who do not work in the social media industry to understand this
process. While some industry experts and scholars place significant hopes
in deep learning to solve the problem of online abuse, others identify the
limitations of this approach, including a relative lack of training
datasets; the misinterpretation of contextual cues and relational history,
and the danger of systematic bias that can inadvertently slip into such
modelling. Furthermore, there is a relative lack of insight from the
perspectives of sociology and psychology and other social science
disciplines about how users (adults and children) perceive such
interventions and about their desirability. For instance, how do users
understand the balance of rights to safety on the one hand and privacy and
freedom of expression on the other, when it comes to the application of
proactive moderation tools?

For this special issue, we are looking for a variety of submissions from a
range of disciplines that examine various aspects of AI applications to
address abuse. This includes but it is not limited to: communication,
education, psychology, sociology, philosophy, computer science and
engineering, human computer interaction, science and technology studies,
among others.

The goals of this special issue are:

   - Outline various approaches in the application of NLP, machine learning
   and AI to addressing cyberbullying, harassment, and various specific forms
   of cyberaggression
   - Outline the state of the field today, assessing the strengths and
   limitations of the solutions currently available
   - Find articles that not only report on current approaches to the use of
   AI in moderation, but also critique current methods applied by social media
   platforms
   - Find insights from technical sciences and social science research that
   would inform the design and deployment of tools for computational scholars
   - Facilitate interdisciplinarity by translating some of the work
   undertaken in the fields of computer science and engineering into a
   language that is more accessible to scholars in social sciences and
   humanities
   - Drawing attention of the scholars in technical fields to the work
   being done in social sciences and humanities on this topic that can further
   inform their research

Abstracts (max 500 words) should be submitted by September 15, 2020 to
Tijana Milosevic at tijana.milosevic at dcu.ie. Full manuscripts (typical
length between 6,000 and 9,000 words-please seek permission in advance if
you need to submit a shorter or longer manuscript) to be submitted by
December 1st, 2020. The issue is planned for June 2021. Please do not
hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

*NB: We are interested in a wide range of topics and we would also consider
submissions that address the moderation of issues that do not necessarily
fall under online bullying, such as online grooming, for instance.
Nonetheless, please note that if you are contemplating such a topic that is
a bit outside the scope of the special issue, it is really important to tie
the discussion with cyberbullying in some way—e.g. by contextualising
cybergrooming as a form of online bullying.*

We thank you in advance for considering our special issue for publishing
your work.

Sincerely,

Tijana Milosevic, Kathleen Van Royen, and Brian Davis

Guest Editors

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Kind regards,
Tijana Milosevic
Postdoctoral researcher,
National Anti-Bullying Research and Resource Centre
Dublin City University
www.tijanamilosevic.org
@TiMilosevic
<https://antibullyingcentre.ie/>