The 4th Stage of Genocide: Computational Analysis of Dehumanization of Ukrainians on Russian Telegram
Date
2023
Authors
Burovova, Kateryna
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Abstract
Dehumanization is a pernicious psychological process of denying some or all attributes of humanness to the target group. It is frequently cited as a common hallmark of incitement to commit genocide. The international security landscape has
seen a dramatic shift following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. This, coupled
with recent developments in the conceptualization of dehumanization, necessitates
the creation of new techniques. These techniques need to be capable of analyzing and detecting this extreme violence-related phenomenon on a large scale. Our
project aims to pioneer the development of a detection system for instances of dehumanization in the Russian language. To achieve this, we collected the entire posting
history of the most popular political bloggers on Russian Telegram. We tested classical machine learning, deep leaning, and zero-shot learning approaches and applied
semantic modeling to explore the evolution of dehumanizing rhetoric. We found
that transformer-based method for entity extraction shows promising results for binary dehumanization classification when applied via an indicator mapping function, while additionally allowing for evaluation of the type of dehumanization instance. The proposed methods can be built into systems of anticipatory governance,
contribute to the collection of evidence of genocidal intent in the Russian invasion
of Ukraine, and pave the way to the large-scale studies of dehumanizing language
and representation of Ukrainians in Russian media.
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Citation
Burovova Kateryna. The 4th Stage of Genocide: Computational
Analysis of Dehumanization of
Ukrainians on Russian Telegram. Ukrainian Catholic University, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Department of Computer Sciences. Lviv 2023, 85 p.