Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Abusive Language Online (ALW2)

Interaction amongst users on social networking platforms can enable constructive and insightful conversations and civic participation; however, on many sites that encourage user interaction, verbal abuse has become commonplace. Abusive behavior such as cyberbullying, hate speech, and scapegoating can poison the social climates within online communities. The last few years have seen a surge in such abusive online behavior, leaving governments, social media platforms, and individuals struggling to deal with the consequences.As a field that works directly with computational analysis of language, the NLP community is uniquely positioned to address the difficult problem of abusive language online; encouraging collaborative and innovate work in this area is the goal of this workshop. The first year of the workshop saw 14 papers presented in a day-long program including interdisciplinary panels and active discussion. In this second edition, we have aimed to build on the success of the first year, maintaining a focus on computationally detecting abusive language and encouraging interdisciplinary work. Reflecting the growing research focus on this topic, the number of submissions received more than doubled from 22 in last year’s edition of the workshop to 48 this year.