Text detoxification is a conditional text generation task aiming to remove offensive content from toxic text. It is highly useful for online forums and social media, where offensive content is frequently encountered. Intuitively, there are diverse ways to detoxify sentences while preserving their meanings, and we can select from detoxified sentences before displaying text to users. Conditional diffusion models are particularly suitable for this task given their demonstrated higher generative diversity than existing conditional text generation models based on language models. Nonetheless, text fluency declines when they are trained with insufficient data, which is the case for this task. In this work, we propose DiffuDetox, a mixed conditional and unconditional diffusion model for text detoxification. The conditional model takes toxic text as the condition and reduces its toxicity, yielding a diverse set of detoxified sentences. The unconditional model is trained to recover the input text, which allows the introduction of additional fluent text for training and thus ensures text fluency. Extensive experimental results and in-depth analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DiffuDetox.

Offensive and toxic text on social media platforms can lead to polarization and divisiveness within online communities and hinders constructive dialogue. Text detoxification is a crucial task in natural language processing to ensure the generation of non-toxic and safe text. Text detoxification is a special case of the Text Style Transfer (TST) problem, where an input text is rephrased to an output text that preserves its content while modifying the style (in this case to a more neutral, non-toxic style). State-of-the-art methods for detoxification use supervised training of encoder-decoder models to produce gold-standard outputs with a standard likelihood-based objective. However, it can be hard for these models to deviate from their pretrained auto-encoder identity mapping. While previous methods have used unlikelihood-based losses to penalize input-to-output copying of toxic content, these methods also unfortunately penalize non-toxic content in the input that would be fine to preserve in the output. To address these issues, we introduce a novel contrastive unlikelihood objective (COUNT) that directly contrasts the gold standard rephrasing with the identity input-to-output mapping to effectively isolate and focus learning on non-toxic style transfer. We benchmark COUNT on two parallel datasets, ParaDetox and APPDIA, showing that it achieves significant improvements in jointly combined fluency, content preservation, and detoxification (i.e., the highest “J” score).

Social media has emerged as a key channel for seeking information. Online users spend several hours reading, posting, and searching for news on microblogging platforms daily. However, this could act as a double-edged sword especially when not all information online is reliable. Moreover, the inherently unmoderated nature of social media renders identifying unverified information ever more challenging. Most of the existing approaches for rumor tracking are not scalable because of their dependency on a significant amount of labeled data. In this work, we investigate this problem from different angles. We design an Active-Transfer Learning (ATL) strategy to identify rumors with a limited amount of annotated data. We go beyond that and investigate the impact of leveraging various machine learning approaches in addition to different contextual representations. We discuss the impact of multiple classifiers on a limited amount of annotated data followed by an interactive approach to gradually update the models by adding the least certain samples (LCS) from the pool of unlabeled data. Our proposed Active Learning (AL) strategy achieves faster convergence in terms of the F-score while requiring fewer annotated samples (42% of the whole dataset for the best model).