It Is Not Only the Negative that Deserves Attention!
Understanding, Generation & Evaluation of (Positive) Moderation
Abstract
Moderation is essential for maintaining and improving the quality of online discussions. This involves: (1) countering negativity, e.g. hate speech and toxicity, and (2) promoting positive discourse, e.g. broadening the discussion to involve other users and perspectives. While significant efforts have focused on addressing negativity, driven by an urgency to address such issues, this left moderation promoting positive discourse (henceforth PositiveModeration) under-studied. With the recent advancements in LLMs, Positive Moderation can potentially be scaled to vast conversations, fostering more thoughtful discussions and bridging the increasing divide in online interactions.We advance the understanding of Positive Moderation by annotating a dataset on 13 moderation properties, e.g. neutrality, clarity and curiosity. We extract instructions from professional moderation guidelines and use them to prompt LLaMA to generate such moderation. This is followed by extensive evaluation showing that (1) annotators rate generated higher than professional moderation, but still slightly prefer professional moderation in pairwise comparison, and (2) LLMs can be used to estimate human evaluation as an efficient alternative.
Details
- Organisation(s)
-
Natural Language Processing Section
- External Organisation(s)
-
University of Stuttgart
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
- Type
- Conference contribution
- Pages
- 11360-11395
- No. of pages
- 36
- Publication date
- 04.2025
- Publication status
- Published
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Networks and Communications, Hardware and Architecture, Information Systems, Software
- Electronic version(s)
-
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.567 (Access:
Open
)
