APPDIA: A Discourse-aware Transformer-based Style Transfer Model for Offensive Social Media Conversations

Katherine Atwell, Sabit Hassan, Malihe Alikhani


Abstract
Using style-transfer models to reduce offensiveness of social media comments can help foster a more inclusive environment. However, there are no sizable datasets that contain offensive texts and their inoffensive counterparts, and fine-tuning pretrained models with limited labeled data can lead to the loss of original meaning in the style-transferred text. To address this issue, we provide two major contributions. First, we release the first publicly-available, parallel corpus of offensive Reddit comments and their style-transferred counterparts annotated by expert sociolinguists. Then, we introduce the first discourse-aware style-transfer models that can effectively reduce offensiveness in Reddit text while preserving the meaning of the original text. These models are the first to examine inferential links between the comment and the text it is replying to when transferring the style of offensive Reddit text. We propose two different methods of integrating discourse relations with pretrained transformer models and evaluate them on our dataset of offensive comments from Reddit and their inoffensive counterparts. Improvements over the baseline with respect to both automatic metrics and human evaluation indicate that our discourse-aware models are better at preserving meaning in style-transferred text when compared to the state-of-the-art discourse-agnostic models.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.530
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6063–6074
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.530
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Katherine Atwell, Sabit Hassan, and Malihe Alikhani. 2022. APPDIA: A Discourse-aware Transformer-based Style Transfer Model for Offensive Social Media Conversations. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6063–6074, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
APPDIA: A Discourse-aware Transformer-based Style Transfer Model for Offensive Social Media Conversations (Atwell et al., COLING 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.530.pdf
Code
 sabithsn/appdia-discourse-style-transfer