HaTe Detector: A Tool for Detecting and Correcting Harmful Terminology in Computing Artifacts

As the field of computing has advanced over the years, how we engage and innovate as a society has as well. From computing practitioners that develop the technologies to end-users, the internet has become a central hub for our daily activities. There have been numerous efforts to ensure that the content in online social communities like Twitter are inclusive. However, despite the history of harmful terminology use in computing, little work explicitly attempts to provide support for detecting and correcting offensive language in online programming communities like GitHub. This paper introduces the Hate Detector, a web application for detecting and correcting harmful terminology in computing artifacts. The current implementation connects with GitHub and uses existing resources and corpora to support the analysis of repository markdown files. Our ongoing efforts aim to evaluate and scale the Hate Detector across and beyond GitHub projects to further promote inclusive practices in online programming communities.