We are delighted to present the Special Issue on NLP Approaches to Offensive Content Online published in the Journal of Natural Language Engineering issue 29.6. We are happy to have received a total of 26 submissions to the special issue evidencing the interest of the NLP community in this topic. Our guest editorial board comprised of international experts in the field has worked hard to review all submissions over multiple rounds of peer review. Ultimately, we accepted nine articles to appear in this special issue.

The OffensEval shared tasks organized as part of SemEval-2019–2020 were very popular, attracting over 1300 participating teams. The two editions of the shared task helped advance the state of the art in offensive language identification by providing the community with benchmark datasets in Arabic, Danish, English, Greek, and Turkish. The datasets were annotated using the OLID hierarchical taxonomy, which since then has become the de facto standard in general offensive language identification research and was widely used beyond OffensEval. We present a survey of OffensEval and related competitions, and we discuss the main lessons learned. We further evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), which have recently revolutionalized the field of Natural Language Processing. We use zero-shot prompting with six popular LLMs and zero-shot learning with two task-specific fine-tuned BERT models, and we compare the results against those of the top-performing teams at the OffensEval competitions. Our results show that while some LMMs such as Flan-T5 achieve competitive performance, in general LLMs lag behind the best OffensEval systems.

Flagship species are those chosen to raise support for broader conservation marketing campaigns and can be used as symbols of the ecosystem services and evolutionary history of particular areas. Thus, flagship species can be employed for the protection of endangered species and threatened ecosystems. Northeastern Michoacán, Mexico, is an important region for amphibian diversity but approximately 40% of its mature forest has been removed. Among northeastern Michoacán amphibians, the use of Ambystoma ordinarium as a flagship species is supported by its co-occurrence with other threatened amphibians along riparian zones. To support this proposal, however, it is important to assess the functional traits and evolutionary history of amphibian species sharing their habitat with A. ordinarium. To evaluate the potential of A. ordinarium as a flagship species, we estimated the functional and phylogenetic diversity of amphibian assemblages in 60 riparian zones. The results showed that amphibian assemblages sharing habitat with A. ordinarium presented higher functional and phylogenetic diversity than those in which this species was absent. These results highlight the potential of A. ordinarium as a flagship species for the protection of associated amphibian species, their functions, and evolutionary history.

The WUT (weight, urine color, and thirst) Venn diagram is a practical hydration assessment tool; however, this relationship has only been investigated using first-morning measurements and urinary indices. This study investigated the accuracy of the WUT Venn diagram at morning and afternoon timepoints compared to blood and urine markers. Twelve men (21±2 years; 81.0±15.9 kg) and twelve women (22±3 years; 68.8±15.2 kg) completed the study. Body mass, urine color, urine specific gravity (USG), urine osmolality (UOSM), thirst level, and plasma osmolality (POSM) were collected at first-morning and afternoon spot samples for 3 consecutive days in free-living and euhydrated states. Number of markers indicating dehydration levels were categorized into either 3, 2, 1, or 0 WUT markers. Receiver operating characteristics analysis calculated the sensitivity and specificity of 1, 2, or 3 hydration markers in detecting dehydration or euhydration. Specificity values across morning and afternoon timepoints exhibited high diagnostic accuracy for USG (0.890-1.000), UOSM (0.869-1.000), and POSM (0.787-0.990) when 2 and 3 WUT markers were met. Sensitivity values across both timepoints exhibited high diagnostic accuracy for USG (0.826-0.941) and UOSM (0.826-0.941), but not POSM in the afternoon (0.324) when 0 and 1 WUT markers were met. The WUT Venn diagram is accurate in detecting dehydration for WUT2 and WUT3 based off USG, UOSM, and POSM from first-morning and afternoon samples. Applied medical, sport, and occupational practitioners can use this practical tool in field settings to assess hydration status not only at various timepoints throughout the day, but also in free-living individuals.