Toward Disambiguating the Definitions of Abusive, Offensive, Toxic, and Uncivil Comments

Pia Pachinger, Allan Hanbury, Julia Neidhardt, Anna Planitzer


Abstract
The definitions of abusive, offensive, toxic and uncivil comments used for annotating corpora for automated content moderation are highly intersected and researchers call for their disambiguation. We summarize the definitions of these terms as they appear in 23 papers across different fields. We compare examples given for uncivil, offensive, and toxic comments, attempting to foster more unified scientific resources. Additionally, we stress that the term incivility that frequently appears in social science literature has hardly been mentioned in the literature we analyzed that focuses on computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Anthology ID:
2023.c3nlp-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP)
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Sunipa Dev, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, David Adelani, Dirk Hovy, Luciana Benotti
Venue:
C3NLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
107–113
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.c3nlp-1.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.c3nlp-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pia Pachinger, Allan Hanbury, Julia Neidhardt, and Anna Planitzer. 2023. Toward Disambiguating the Definitions of Abusive, Offensive, Toxic, and Uncivil Comments. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP), pages 107–113, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Toward Disambiguating the Definitions of Abusive, Offensive, Toxic, and Uncivil Comments (Pachinger et al., C3NLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.c3nlp-1.11.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.c3nlp-1.11.mp4