task_categories:text-classification language:de license:cc-by-4.0 region:us
# Task Description

Participants were allowed to participate in one or
both tasks and submit at most three runs per task.

## Task 1: Coarse-grained Binary Classification

Task 1 was to decide whether a tweet includes some
form of offensive language or not. The tweets had
to be classified into the two classes OFFENSE and
OTHER. The OFFENSE category covered abusive
language, insults, as well as merely profane statements.

## Task 2: Fine-grained 4-way Classification

The second task involved four categories, a nonoffensive OTHER class and three sub-categories of what is OFFENSE in 
Task 1. In the case of PROFANITY, profane words are used, however, the tweet does not want to insult anyone. This 
typically concerns the usage of swearwords (Scheiße, Fuck etc.) and cursing (Zur Holle! Verdammt! etc.). This can be 
often found in youth language. Swearwords and cursing may, but need not, co-occur with insults or abusive speech. 
Profane language may in fact be used in tweets with positive sentiment to express emphasis. Whenever profane words are 
not directed towards a specific person or group of persons and there are no separate cues of INSULT or ABUSE, then 
tweets are labeled as simple cases of PROFANITY.

In the case of INSULT, unlike PROFANITY, the tweet clearly wants to offend someone. INSULT is the ascription of 
negatively evaluated qualities or deficiencies or the labeling of persons as unworthy (in some sense) or unvalued. 
Insults convey disrespect and contempt. Whether an utterance is an insult usually depends on the community in which it 
is made, on the social context (ongoing activity etc.) in which it is made, and on the linguistic means that are used 
(which have to be found to be conventional means whose assessment as insulting are intersubjectively reasonably 
stable).

And finally, in the case of ABUSE, the tweet does not just insult a person but represents the stronger form of abusive 
language. By abuse we define a special type of degradation. This type of degrading consists in ascribing a social 
identity to a person that is judged negatively by a (perceived) majority of society. The identity in question is seen 
as a shameful, unworthy, morally objectionable or marginal identity. In contrast to insults, instances of abusive 
language require that the target of judgment is seen as a representative of a group and it is ascribed negative 
qualities that are taken to be universal, omnipresent and unchangeable characteristics of the group. (This part of the 
definition largely co-incides with what is referred to as abusive speech in other research.) Aside from the cases where 
people are degraded based on their membership in some group, we also classify it as abusive language when 
dehumanization is employed even just towards an individual (i.e. describing a person as scum or vermin etc.).
@incollection{WiegandSiegelRuppenhofer2019,
  author    = {Michael Wiegand and Melanie Siegel and Josef Ruppenhofer},
  title     = {Overview of the GermEval 2018 Shared Task on the Identification of Offensive Language},
  series = {Proceedings of GermEval 2018, 14th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2018), Vienna, Austria – September 21, 2018},
  editor    = {Josef Ruppenhofer and Melanie Siegel and Michael Wiegand},
  publisher = {Austrian Academy of Sciences},
  address   = {Vienna, Austria},
  isbn      = {978-3-7001-8435-5},
  url       = {https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-84935},
  pages     = {1 -- 10},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {We present the pilot edition of the GermEval Shared Task on the Identification of Offensive Language. This shared task deals with the classification of German tweets from Twitter. It comprises two tasks, a coarse-grained binary classification task and a fine-grained multi-class classification task. The shared task had 20 participants submitting 51 runs for the coarse-grained task and 25 runs for the fine-grained task. Since this is a pilot task, we describe the process of extracting the raw-data for the data collection and the annotation schema. We evaluate the results of the systems submitted to the shared task. The shared task homepage can be found at https://projects.cai. fbi.h-da.de/iggsa/},
  language  = {en}
}
---
license: cc-by-4.0
dataset_info:
  features:
  - name: text
    dtype: string
  - name: coarse-grained
    dtype: string
  - name: fine-grained
    dtype: string
  config_name: germeval2018
  splits:
  - name: train
    num_bytes: 840593
    num_examples: 5009
  - name: test
    num_bytes: 519146
    num_examples: 3532
  download_size: 1282870
  dataset_size: 1359739
task_categories:
- text-classification
language:
- de
---