The Research Center on Information and Communication Technologies (CITIC) of the Universidade da Coruña (UDC) collaborated in the organization of the tenth edition of the Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH). The event took place in Budapest, Hungary, on October 29th, as part of the EMNLP 2026 international conference, specializing in Natural Language Processing. CITIC researcher Paloma Piot was part of the organizing committee.
WOAH is a leading scientific forum for researchers studying and detecting various forms of online abuse and harmful content, including hate speech, harassment, and disinformation. This edition received 77 archival submissions and 6 non-archival submissions, with accepted papers from 20 countries, achieving acceptance rates of 51% and 86% respectively.
The program featured four keynote speeches by renowned international specialists, including Sara Tonelli (Fondazione Bruno Kessler), Zeerak Talat (University of Edinburgh), Su Lin Blodgett (Mila – Quebec AI Institute), and Sarah T. Roberts (University of California, Los Angeles).
During EMNLP 2026, Paloma Piot presented the research “From Self to Other: Evaluating Demographic Perspective-Taking in LLM Hate Speech Annotation,” which examines whether large language models (LLMs) can perceive differences in hate speech detection based on simulated demographic profiles. The aim is to enhance the reliability of automatic annotation systems.
Additionally, the work “Beyond the Explicit: A Bilingual Dataset for Dehumanization Detection in Social Media” was presented, developed in collaboration with the GESIS center (Cologne, Germany) and the University of Michigan. This research focuses on the automatic detection of dehumanizing language on social media using a bilingual dataset (English and German).
The WOAH organization has confirmed the continuation of the event for 2027, when its eleventh edition will be held in Kyoto (Japan), in collaboration with ACL 2027, another major international Natural Language Processing conference. The goal is to further promote collaboration and the exchange of advancements in preventing online abuse.
