P1 Guest talk by PhD student Leonor Veloso

Title: SLAyiNG: A Diverse and Community-validated Dataset of Queer Slang

Abstract: Queer vernacular is rarely studied in NLP, despite advancements in resources and evaluation for other sociolects and informal language. Because of this, NLP systems often process queer language incorrectly, e.g., they misclassify it as hate speech or generate negative responses. To address this problem, we propose Slaying, the first real-world dataset of English queer slang. Slaying is community-validated, and includes over 500 queer slang terms that pertain to more than 20 queer subcommunities. We argue that queer language data resources have great potential in NLP (e.g., as components of large pretraining corpora and as the basis for benchmarks) and can improve queer users' experience of NLP systems. We leverage Slaying for two novel findings in support of this argument: (i) For a number of language models, we show that they are unbiased towards the queer community, but at the same time unable to process its language, i.e., absence of representation bias does not entail the absence of linguistic bias. (ii) Model performance on queer slang varies across queer subcommunities; it is generally worse for slang pertaining to African-American and Latine communities. These findings are relevant for both the queer NLP and the broader ML communities. SLAyiNG is available to the public, and open to future revisions and extensions.

Short bio: Leonor Veloso is a 3rd year PhD student at the Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS), LMU Munich, advised by Prof. Dr. Hinrich Schütze. Her research lies at the intersection of mechanistic interpretability and sociolinguistics. Leonor is particularly interested in curating data resources to enable the development of interpretable and fair language models.

Prior to joining CIS, Leonor obtained her MSc in Computer Science at Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon), where she worked on gender-inclusive NLP models for the Portuguese language.

Outside the lab, she enjoys post-punk and knitting socks.