Hatevolution: What Static Benchmarks Don't Tell Us
Authors: name: Chiara Di Bonaventura, name: Barbara McGillivray, name: Yulan He, name: Albert Meroño-Peñuela

Language changes over time, including in the hate speech domain, which
evolves quickly following social dynamics and cultural shifts. While NLP
research has investigated the impact of language evolution on model training
and has proposed several solutions for it, its impact on model benchmarking
remains under-explored. Yet, hate speech benchmarks play a crucial role to
ensure model safety. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the robustness of
20 language models across two evolving hate speech experiments, and we show the
temporal misalignment between static and time-sensitive evaluations. Our
findings call for time-sensitive linguistic benchmarks in order to correctly
and reliably evaluate language models in the hate speech domain.