Counterspeeches up my sleeve! Intent Distribution Learning and Persistent Fusion for Intent-Conditioned Counterspeech Generation

Rishabh Gupta, Shaily Desai, Manvi Goel, Anil Bandhakavi, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Md. Shad Akhtar


Abstract
Counterspeech has been demonstrated to be an efficacious approach for combating hate speech. While various conventional and controlled approaches have been studied in recent years to generate counterspeech, a counterspeech with a certain intent may not be sufficient in every scenario. Due to the complex and multifaceted nature of hate speech, utilizing multiple forms of counter-narratives with varying intents may be advantageous in different circumstances. In this paper, we explore intent-conditioned counterspeech generation. At first, we develop IntentCONAN, a diversified intent-specific counterspeech dataset with 6831 counterspeeches conditioned on five intents, i.e., informative, denouncing, question, positive, and humour. Subsequently, we propose QUARC, a two-stage framework for intent-conditioned counterspeech generation. QUARC leverages vector-quantized representations learned for each intent category along with PerFuMe, a novel fusion module to incorporate intent-specific information into the model. Our evaluation demonstrates that QUARC outperforms several baselines by an average of ~10% across evaluation metrics. An extensive human evaluation supplements our hypothesis of better and more appropriate responses than comparative systems.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.318
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5792–5809
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.318
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.318
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rishabh Gupta, Shaily Desai, Manvi Goel, Anil Bandhakavi, Tanmoy Chakraborty, and Md. Shad Akhtar. 2023. Counterspeeches up my sleeve! Intent Distribution Learning and Persistent Fusion for Intent-Conditioned Counterspeech Generation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5792–5809, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Counterspeeches up my sleeve! Intent Distribution Learning and Persistent Fusion for Intent-Conditioned Counterspeech Generation (Gupta et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.318.pdf