The article reports on work presented to a recent web conference on the subject of ‘personal attacks in online discussions’. As is often the case with data mining and machine learning, a critical issue is that of training the algorithm doing the analysis. The work in question, performed by Ellery Wulczyn et al, used training data assembled as a result of crowdsourcing the trainers, 4,000 of them to be precise.
Link to article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v545/n7653/full/545166a.html