Muted: Multilingual Targeted Offensive Speech Identification and Visualization

Christoph Tillmann, Aashka Trivedi, Sara Rosenthal, Santosh Borse, Rong Zhang, Avirup Sil, Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee


Abstract
Offensive language such as hate, abuse, and profanity (HAP) occurs in various content on the web. While previous work has mostly dealt with sentence level annotations, there have been a few recent attempts to identify offensive spans as well. We build upon this work and introduce MUTED, a system to identify multilingual HAP content by displaying offensive arguments and their targets using heat maps to indicate their intensity. MUTED can leverage any transformer-based HAP-classification model and its attention mechanism out-of-the-box to identify toxic spans, without further fine-tuning. In addition, we use the spaCy library to identify the specific targets and arguments for the words predicted by the attention heatmaps. We present the model’s performance on identifying offensive spans and their targets in existing datasets and present new annotations on German text. Finally, we demonstrate our proposed visualization tool on multilingual inputs.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-demo.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Yansong Feng, Els Lefever
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
229–236
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-demo.19
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-demo.19
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christoph Tillmann, Aashka Trivedi, Sara Rosenthal, Santosh Borse, Rong Zhang, Avirup Sil, and Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee. 2023. Muted: Multilingual Targeted Offensive Speech Identification and Visualization. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 229–236, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Muted: Multilingual Targeted Offensive Speech Identification and Visualization (Tillmann et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-demo.19.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-demo.19.mp4