Abstract: 

Prejudices against any group undermine the fabric of society and have far-reaching consequences. Therefore, it is essential to fight against it; however, to do so, we need to understand its layers and real nature. The level of antisemitism in Hungary has always been among the highest in Europe. Representative surveys show that approximately 33 percent of the Hungarian population harbor antisemitic prejudices. A representative survey among Hungarian Jews in 2017 showed an even darker picture as 65 percent of these people feel that antisemitism is strong or very strong in the country. In the case of Hungary, antisemitism is manifested mostly in the form of hate speech, and the internet has become its main terrain. To systematically scrutinize this vast amount of online textual data, the use of Natural Language Processing is indispensable. However, sociological domain knowledge is just as necessary to interpret the results of NLP.

Bio: 

Ildikó B is a sociologist and a survey statistician. She is an Associate Professor at ELTE University Faculty of Social Sciences (ELTE FSS) Budapest, where she also serves as Chair of the Department of Social Research Methodology. She is the co-leader of the Research Center for Computational Social Science at ELTE FSS (https://rc2s2.eu/en). Her research topics include NLP in sociology, antisemitism, and xenophobia.