Dipartimento di Informatica

Descrizione del progetto

Anti-immigration attitudes frequently fuels the spread of hate expressions in the variety of media nowadays exploited.
Like a mirror of the political choices, of attitudes of the population and feeling encoded in the collective memory of a nation, expressions and words exploited for defining migrants are coined and used by humans when faced with the challenges represented by immigration. They are relevant for determining who is migrant and for classifying different forms of migrants to be related to different positions in society, often fossilized in prejudices and stereotypes. Language is crucial for determining boundaries among groups and minorities, to confer them specific social roles, rights and opportunities, in practice to describe migrants as others, as outsiders of our society, often as dangerous and unwanted people notwithstanding their real nature. But, on the other hand, language can also be exploited by immigrants to react to the challenges of integration in a different society.
The main goal of the project is to foster the transition from data about immigrants to knowledge, i.e. collecting data available in social media and transforming them in actionable and more accessible knowledge for the territorial entities which work in raising awareness about discrimination and taking action against it, like the associations that participated in the project. For moving toward this goal, we approached the creation of computational tools for countering on line Hate Speech (henceforth HS) against immigrants. The methodology applied in the project includes the study of the different facets of this phenomenon, the development of systems that allow its automatic detection in social media texts, the aggregation and visualization of resulting information in interfaces easily accessible for different categories of stakeholders. According to the proposal of the project, we performed activities that can be organized around some main directions: research and development, and dissemination.
The former mainly involved the research group and the latter the associations that were involved in the project, but it is worth to notice that the application of a strategy of continuous cooperation has been crucial for the achievement of the results described below.

Note