BoTox-Dataset for Classifying German Hate Speech Comments with Criminal Relevance

This repository contains the BoTox dataset, a German dataset for analyzing offensive language and conversations in the context of criminal relevance under the German Criminal Code (StGB). It was created as part of the BoTox research project (https://botox.h-da.de/) in 2025, which aimed to investigate hate speech in a criminal law context and to detect hate speech bots.

Content

• public dataset with comment texts as csv
• annotation guidelines (original German version)

About the Dataset

This is a German dataset on offensive language, annotated according to three predefined classes, each with several paragraphs from German criminal law. In total, the dataset contains 1,190 annotated comments from various sources. The data was compiled in 2025 and annotated by three teams of annotators after intensive training by the Frankfurt am Main Public Prosecutor's Office. The dataset contains annotations according to inter-annotator agreement. Further details can be found in the accompanying paper.

Description of the columns

Citation

If you use the dataset, please cite our respective paper A Novel Dataset for Classifying German Hate Speech Comments with Criminal Relevance", which was presented on the on the 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) at August 1, 2025 as part of the ACL conference.

ACL-Style:
Vincent Kums, Florian Meyer, Luisa Pivit, Uliana Vedenina, Jonas Wortmann, Melanie Siegel and Dirk Labudde

1. A Novel Dataset for Classifying German Hate Speech Comments with Criminal Relevance. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), pages 41-52, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{kums-etal-2025-novel,
    title = "A Novel Dataset for Classifying {G}erman Hate Speech Comments with Criminal Relevance",
    author = "Kums, Vincent  and
      Meyer, Florian  and
      Pivit, Luisa  and
      Vedenina, Uliana  and
      Wortmann, Jonas  and
      Siegel, Melanie  and
      Labudde, Dirk",
    editor = "Calabrese, Agostina  and
      de Kock, Christine  and
      Nozza, Debora  and
      Plaza-del-Arco, Flor Miriam  and
      Talat, Zeerak  and
      Vargas, Francielle",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.woah-1.4/",
    pages = "41--52",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-105-6"
}