Identifying Condescending Language: A Tale of Two Distinct Phenomena?

Carla Perez Almendros, Steven Schockaert


Abstract
Patronizing and condescending language is characterized, among others, by its subtle nature. It thus seems reasonable to assume that detecting condescending language in text would be harder than detecting more explicitly harmful language, such as hate speech. However, the results of a SemEval-2022 Task devoted to this topic paint a different picture, with the top-performing systems achieving remarkably strong results. In this paper, we analyse the surprising effectiveness of standard text classification methods in more detail. In particular, we highlight the presence of two rather different types of condescending language in the dataset from the SemEval task. Some inputs are condescending because of the way they talk about a particular subject, i.e. condescending language in this case is a linguistic phenomenon, which can, in principle, be learned from training examples. However, other inputs are condescending because of the nature of what is said, rather than the way in which it is expressed, e.g. by emphasizing stereotypes about a given community. In such cases, our ability to detect condescending language, with current methods, largely depends on the presence of similar examples in the training data.
Anthology ID:
2022.nlp4pi-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Laura Biester, Dorottya Demszky, Zhijing Jin, Mrinmaya Sachan, Joel Tetreault, Steven Wilson, Lu Xiao, Jieyu Zhao
Venue:
NLP4PI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
130–141
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlp4pi-1.15
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.nlp4pi-1.15
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carla Perez Almendros and Steven Schockaert. 2022. Identifying Condescending Language: A Tale of Two Distinct Phenomena?. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI), pages 130–141, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying Condescending Language: A Tale of Two Distinct Phenomena? (Perez Almendros & Schockaert, NLP4PI 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlp4pi-1.15.pdf