Semantic Quantum Correlations in Hate Speeches

  • Francesco Galofaro
  • Zeno Toffano
  • Bich Lien Doan
Keywords: Semiotics, Semantics, Quantum Information Retrieval, Hate Speech, Political discourse

Abstract

The intervention shows the first results of a research conducted on a corpus of 7000 posts collected on the Reddit social network during the 2016 American presidential campaign. The research is the result of a collaboration between Berkeley D-Lab, who shared the corpus, LSI - CentraleSupélec and CUBE. Thanks to funding from the Anti-Defamation League, the corpus has been labeled to apply Machine Learning techniques: 400 posts have been labeled as “hate speech” by human analysts. Galofaro, Toffano and Doan applied to both sub-corpora (hate and non-hate speeches) an analysis technique inspired by Greimas’s structural semantics, Eco’s semiotics, and Quantum Information Retrieval (van Rijsbergen).
Each text was formalized as a semantic network using the HAL technique. We then measured the semantic similarity between two key words formalized as two word-vectors with the classical measure of cosine-similarity and then compared it with the degree of quantum correlation between them measured with the Born rule. This correlation, linked to the co-occurrence of the word vectors in the same contexts, extracts from the latter useful information to characterize the considered semantic relationships (“presence of correlation”, “absence of correlation” or “presence of anti-correlation”). In this way, the new technique allows to overcome some critical aspects of the Machine Learning techniques currently in use, being based on the meaning of the text and not on the way in which the human analyst labels the corpus.

References

Aa.Vv. (2012), «Countering hate speech online», in EEANews, from: https://eeagrants.org/news/countering-hate-speech-online last accessed: October 1st 2019.

Barros, Joao, Toffano, Zeno, Meguebli, Youssef, and Bich-Liên Doan (2014), «Contextual Query Using Bell Tests», in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 8369, Springer, Berlin, pp. 110-121.

Dubois François, Toffano Zeno (2017) «Eigenlogic: A Quantum View for Multiple-Valued and Fuzzy Systems», in Quantum Interaction. QI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 10106, Springer, Berlin, pp. 239-251.

Eco, Umberto (1962) Opera aperta, Bompiani, Milano 1976 (Open work, transl. by A. Cancogni, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. 1989).

Eco, Umberto (1972), Le forme del contenuto, Bompiani, Milano.

Ferraro, Guido (2019) Semiotica 3.0: 50 idee chiave per un rilancio della scienza della significazione, I saggi di Lexia 31, Roma, Aracne.

Galofaro, Francesco, Toffano, Zeno and Bich-Liên Doan (2018), «Quantum Semantic Correlations in Hate and Non-Hate Speeches», in Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 283, pp. 62-74, from http://eptcs.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/content.cgi

?CAPNS2018

Greimas, Algirdas Algirdas J. (1966), Sémantique structurale, Paris, PUF 2002 (Structural semantics: an attempt at a method, transl. by D. McDowell, R. Schleifer, A. Velie, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE 1984).

Greimas, Algirdas J., Rastier, François (1968), «The interaction of semiotic constraints», in Yale French Studies, 41, pp. 86-105.

Lund, Kevin and Burgess, Curt (1996), «Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence», in Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, Vol. 28, n. 2, pp. 203- 208.

Marsciani, Francesco (2014), «À propos de quelques questions inactuelles en théorie de la signification», in Actes sémiotiques, n. 117, from https://www.unilim.fr/actes-semiotiques/5279 .

Nockleby, John T. (2000), Hate Speech, in Levy, Leonard W., Karst, Kenneth L. et al., Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, Macmillan, New York, pp. 1277-1279.

Quillian, M. Ross (1968), Semantic Memory, in Minsky, Marvin (1968), Semantic Information Processing, Cambridge Mass, MIT press.

Rastier, François (2009), Sémantique interprétative, Presses Universitaires de France. 3rd edition.

Van Rijsbergen, C. J. Keith (2004), The Geometry of Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Von Neumann, 1932, Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik, Springer-Verlag, Berlin (Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1955).

Wilce, Alexander (2017), Quantum Logic and Probability Theory, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entrie

s/qt-quantlog/

Yanowski, Noson S. and Iannucci, Mirco A. (2008), Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Ziqi Zhang & Lei Luo (2018), «Hate Speech Detection: A Solved Problem? The Challenging Case of Long Tail on Twitter», in Semantic Web, in press (status: accepted) from arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.03662.

Published
2020-08-18
How to Cite
Galofaro, F., Toffano, Z. and Doan, B. L. (2020) “Semantic Quantum Correlations in Hate Speeches”, Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio. doi: 10.4396/SFL2019ES08.
Section
Emotions and meaning