To Block or not to Block: Experiments with Machine Learning for News Comment Moderation

Today, news media organizations regularly engage with readers by enabling them to comment on news articles. This creates the need for comment moderation and removal of disallowed comments -- a time-consuming task often performed by human moderators. In this paper we approach the problem of automatic news comment moderation as classification of comments into blocked and not blocked categories. We construct a novel dataset of annotated English comments, experiment with cross-lingual transfer of comment labels and evaluate several machine learning models on datasets of Croatian and Estonian news comments. Team name: SuperAdmin; Challenge: Detection of blocked comments; Tools/models: CroSloEn BERT, FinEst BERT, 24Sata comment dataset, Ekspress comment dataset.

Intellectual Freedom, Mildness, and Moderation in the Literature of Al-Jahiz

This research tackles important humanitarian issues, both old and new, dealt with by Al-Jahiz in his books and letters. The most important of which is the issue of intellectual freedom, mildness, and moderation. In the process of dealing with these matters, it became quite clear how Al- Jahiz was a humanitarian who persistently tried to find common ground and harmony between people as well as his continuous call not to turn variety and difference into conflict. And so, Al-Jahiz became quite the advocate of intellectual freedom of his time, dismissing all that restrains him, in different venues of life, and believing in the importance of different opinions. Consequently, he established a culture on civilized conversation and rejected all kinds of fanaticism, extremism, sternness, and accusations of infidelity. The research also attempts to delve deep down into Al-Jahiz’s intellect in the issues he tackled. It also tries to arrive at a reading of these issues in his texts. However, the research does not link Al-Jahiz’s intellect with the historical background or with the Mu’tazilah creed that made him glorify the mind making it his authority in every matter. Finally, the research attributes Al-Jahiz’s intellect to his rare literary genius that made him capable of approximating every creed to different kinds of minds.