Simon Cullen


2025

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SafeSpeech: A Comprehensive and Interactive Tool for Analysing Sexist and Abusive Language in Conversations
Xingwei Tan | Chen Lyu | Hafiz Muhammad Umer | Sahrish Khan | Mahathi Parvatham | Lois Arthurs | Simon Cullen | Shelley Wilson | Arshad Jhumka | Gabriele Pergola
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (System Demonstrations)

Detecting toxic language, including sexism, harassment, and abusive behaviour, remains a critical challenge, particularly in its subtle and context-dependent forms. Existing approaches largely focus on isolated message-level classification, overlooking toxicity that emerges across conversational contexts. To promote and enable future research in this direction, we introduce *SafeSpeech*, a comprehensive platform for toxic content detection and analysis that bridges message-level and conversation-level insights. The platform integrates fine-tuned classifiers and large language models (LLMs) to enable multi-granularity detection, toxic-aware conversation summarization, and persona profiling. *SafeSpeech* also incorporates explainability mechanisms, such as perplexity gain analysis, to highlight the linguistic elements driving predictions. Evaluations on benchmark datasets, including EDOS, OffensEval, and HatEval, demonstrate the reproduction of state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks, including fine-grained sexism detection.