Computational linguistics against hate: Hate speech detection and visualization on social media in the “Contro L’Odio” project

The paper describes the Web platform built within the project “Contro l’odio”, for monitoring and contrasting discrimination and hate speech against immigrants in Italy. It applies a combination of computational linguistics techniques for hate speech detection and data visualization tools on data drawn from Twitter. It allows users to access a huge amount of information through interactive maps, also tuning their view, e.g., visualizing the most viral tweets and interactively reducing the inherent complexity of data. Educational courses for high school students and citizenship has been developed which are centered on the platform and focused on the deconstruction of negative stereotypes against immigrants, Roma, and religious minorities, and on the creation of positive narratives.