ToXCL: A Unified Framework for Toxic Speech Detection and Explanation

Nhat Hoang, Xuan Long Do, Duc Anh Do, Duc Anh Vu, Anh Tuan Luu


Abstract
The proliferation of online toxic speech is a pertinent problem posing threats to demographic groups. While explicit toxic speech contains offensive lexical signals, implicit one consists of coded or indirect language. Therefore, it is crucial for models not only to detect implicit toxic speech but also to explain its toxicity. This draws a unique need for unified frameworks that can effectively detect and explain implicit toxic speech. Prior works mainly formulated the task of toxic speech detection and explanation as a text generation problem. Nonetheless, models trained using this strategy can be prone to suffer from the consequent error propagation problem. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the detection results of such models are much lower than those that focus only on the detection task. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ToXCL, a unified framework for the detection and explanation of implicit toxic speech. Our model consists of three modules: a (i) Target Group Generator to generate the targeted demographic group(s) of a given post; an (ii) Encoder-Decoder Model in which the encoder focuses on detecting implicit toxic speech and is boosted by a (iii) Teacher Classifier via knowledge distillation, and the decoder generates the necessary explanation. ToXCL achieves new state-of-the-art effectiveness, and outperforms baselines significantly.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.359
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6460–6472
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.359
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.359
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nhat Hoang, Xuan Long Do, Duc Anh Do, Duc Anh Vu, and Anh Tuan Luu. 2024. ToXCL: A Unified Framework for Toxic Speech Detection and Explanation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6460–6472, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ToXCL: A Unified Framework for Toxic Speech Detection and Explanation (Hoang et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.359.pdf