Self-Anchored Attention Model for Sample-Efficient Classification of Prosocial Text Chat

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Zhuofang, Kocielnik, Rafal, Soltani, Fereshteh, Penphob, Boonyarungsrit, Anandkumar, Animashree, Alvarez, R. Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866909645813055488
author Li, Zhuofang
Kocielnik, Rafal
Soltani, Fereshteh
Penphob
Boonyarungsrit
Anandkumar, Animashree
Alvarez, R. Michael
author_facet Li, Zhuofang
Kocielnik, Rafal
Soltani, Fereshteh
Penphob
Boonyarungsrit
Anandkumar, Animashree
Alvarez, R. Michael
contents Millions of players engage daily in competitive online games, communicating through in-game chat. Prior research has focused on detecting relatively small volumes of toxic content using various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for the purpose of moderation. However, recent studies emphasize the importance of detecting prosocial communication, which can be as crucial as identifying toxic interactions. Recognizing prosocial behavior allows for its analysis, rewarding, and promotion. Unlike toxicity, there are limited datasets, models, and resources for identifying prosocial behaviors in game-chat text. In this work, we employed unsupervised discovery combined with game domain expert collaboration to identify and categorize prosocial player behaviors from game chat. We further propose a novel Self-Anchored Attention Model (SAAM) which gives 7.9% improvement compared to the best existing technique. The approach utilizes the entire training set as "anchors" to help improve model performance under the scarcity of training data. This approach led to the development of the first automated system for classifying prosocial behaviors in in-game chats, particularly given the low-resource settings where large-scale labeled data is not available. Our methodology was applied to one of the most popular online gaming titles - Call of Duty(R): Modern Warfare(R)II, showcasing its effectiveness. This research is novel in applying NLP techniques to discover and classify prosocial behaviors in player in-game chat communication. It can help shift the focus of moderation from solely penalizing toxicity to actively encouraging positive interactions on online platforms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_09259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-Anchored Attention Model for Sample-Efficient Classification of Prosocial Text Chat
Li, Zhuofang
Kocielnik, Rafal
Soltani, Fereshteh
Penphob
Boonyarungsrit
Anandkumar, Animashree
Alvarez, R. Michael
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
I.2.7; K.4
Millions of players engage daily in competitive online games, communicating through in-game chat. Prior research has focused on detecting relatively small volumes of toxic content using various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for the purpose of moderation. However, recent studies emphasize the importance of detecting prosocial communication, which can be as crucial as identifying toxic interactions. Recognizing prosocial behavior allows for its analysis, rewarding, and promotion. Unlike toxicity, there are limited datasets, models, and resources for identifying prosocial behaviors in game-chat text. In this work, we employed unsupervised discovery combined with game domain expert collaboration to identify and categorize prosocial player behaviors from game chat. We further propose a novel Self-Anchored Attention Model (SAAM) which gives 7.9% improvement compared to the best existing technique. The approach utilizes the entire training set as "anchors" to help improve model performance under the scarcity of training data. This approach led to the development of the first automated system for classifying prosocial behaviors in in-game chats, particularly given the low-resource settings where large-scale labeled data is not available. Our methodology was applied to one of the most popular online gaming titles - Call of Duty(R): Modern Warfare(R)II, showcasing its effectiveness. This research is novel in applying NLP techniques to discover and classify prosocial behaviors in player in-game chat communication. It can help shift the focus of moderation from solely penalizing toxicity to actively encouraging positive interactions on online platforms.
title Self-Anchored Attention Model for Sample-Efficient Classification of Prosocial Text Chat
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
I.2.7; K.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09259