@inproceedings{khondaker-etal-2024-detoxllm,
    title = "{D}etox{LLM}: A Framework for Detoxification with Explanations",
    author = "Khondaker, Md Tawkat Islam  and
      Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad  and
      Lakshmanan, Laks V. S.",
    editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser  and
      Bansal, Mohit  and
      Chen, Yun-Nung",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Add-Cong-Liu-Florida-Atlantic-University-author-id/2024.emnlp-main.1066/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1066",
    pages = "19112--19139",
    abstract = "Prior works on detoxification are scattered in the sense that they do not cover all aspects of detoxification needed in a real-world scenario. Notably, prior works restrict the task of developing detoxification models to only a seen subset of platforms, leaving the question of how the models would perform on unseen platforms unexplored. Additionally, these works do not address non-detoxifiability, a phenomenon whereby the toxic text cannot be detoxified without altering the meaning. We propose DetoxLLM, the first comprehensive end-to-end detoxification framework, which attempts to alleviate the aforementioned limitations. We first introduce a cross-platform pseudo-parallel corpus applying multi-step data processing and generation strategies leveraging ChatGPT. We then train a suite of detoxification models with our cross-platform corpus. We show that our detoxification models outperform the SoTA model trained with human-annotated parallel corpus. We further introduce explanation to promote transparency and trustworthiness. DetoxLLM additionally offers a unique paraphrase detector especially dedicated for the detoxification task to tackle the non-detoxifiable cases. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our cross-platform corpus and the robustness of DetoxLLM against adversarial toxicity."
}