Silent Signals, Loud Impact: LLMs for Word-Sense Disambiguation of Coded Dog Whistles (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a dog whistle is a coded communication that carries a secondary meaning to specific audiences and is often weaponized for racial and socioeconomic discrimination. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach for word-sense disambiguation of dog whistles from standard speech using Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows disambiguation of dog whistles from standard speech using large language models. |
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| Challenge: | Dog whistles are coded expressions with dual meanings that slip by content moderation filters . a new study finds that state-of-the-art systems fail to identify novel dog whistles . |
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From Dogwhistles to Bullhorns: Unveiling Coded Rhetoric with Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | This work sheds light on the theoretical and applied importance of dogwhistles in both NLP and computational social science. |
| Approach: | They propose a typology of dogwhistles, curate a glossary of over 300 dogwhitles and analyze their usage in historical U.S. politicians’ speeches. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to study animal language systems rely on human prior knowledge on limited data. |
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| Challenge: | a new framework for analyzing hate speech definitions is proposed to address cultural differences in interpretations . a dataset of 493 definitions from more than 100 cultures is used to analyze hate speech . |
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Decoding Hate: Exploring Language Models’ Reactions to Hate Speech (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of unmoderated internet data, enabling them to generate text autonomously. |
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Can LLMs Hear the Dogwhistle? (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifan Liu, Yi Lin, Xinwei Guo, Ziwei Wang, Jiaxin Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Haiyan Wu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
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The “r” in “woman” stands for rights. Auditing LLMs in Uncovering Social Dynamics in Implicit Misogyny (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study examined misogynistic expressions in English and Italian . a taxonomy of social dynamics is used to identify misogorical expressions . |
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