Context Sensitivity Estimation in Toxicity Detection

Alexandros Xenos, John Pavlopoulos, Ion Androutsopoulos


Abstract
User posts whose perceived toxicity depends on the conversational context are rare in current toxicity detection datasets. Hence, toxicity detectors trained on current datasets will also disregard context, making the detection of context-sensitive toxicity a lot harder when it occurs. We constructed and publicly release a dataset of 10k posts with two kinds of toxicity labels per post, obtained from annotators who considered (i) both the current post and the previous one as context, or (ii) only the current post. We introduce a new task, context-sensitivity estimation, which aims to identify posts whose perceived toxicity changes if the context (previous post) is also considered. Using the new dataset, we show that systems can be developed for this task. Such systems could be used to enhance toxicity detection datasets with more context-dependent posts or to suggest when moderators should consider the parent posts, which may not always be necessary and may introduce additional costs.
Anthology ID:
2021.woah-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Douwe Kiela, Mathias Lambert, Bertie Vidgen, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Zeerak Waseem
Venue:
WOAH
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
140–145
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.woah-1.15
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.woah-1.15
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexandros Xenos, John Pavlopoulos, and Ion Androutsopoulos. 2021. Context Sensitivity Estimation in Toxicity Detection. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2021), pages 140–145, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Context Sensitivity Estimation in Toxicity Detection (Xenos et al., WOAH 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.woah-1.15.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.woah-1.15.mp4
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