Introduction to the Special Issue of the TAL Journal on Abusive Language: Linguistic Resources, Methods and Applications

Abusive language and the propagation of harmful stereotypes have unfortunately become commonplace occurrences on various social media platforms, partly due to users’ freedom, anonymity and the lack of regulation provided by these platforms. The sheer volume and often implicit nature of such unwanted content make manual moderation of these user spaces a formidable task. Various scientific communities (Computational Social Science, Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics) interested in its at least partial automation have taken up the problem over the past ten years. This special issue aims to encourage interdisciplinary submissions in the field of abusive language detection discussing the limitations of the current approaches and directions for future work.