@inproceedings{palmer-etal-2017-illegal,
    title = "Illegal is not a Noun: Linguistic Form for Detection of Pejorative Nominalizations",
    author = "Palmer, Alexis  and
      Robinson, Melissa  and
      Phillips, Kristy K.",
    editor = "Waseem, Zeerak  and
      Chung, Wendy Hui Kyong  and
      Hovy, Dirk  and
      Tetreault, Joel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language Online",
    month = aug,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Vancouver, BC, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/W17-3014/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W17-3014",
    pages = "91--100",
    abstract = "This paper focuses on a particular type of abusive language, targeting expressions in which typically neutral adjectives take on pejorative meaning when used as nouns - compare `gay people' to `the gays'. We first collect and analyze a corpus of hand-curated, expert-annotated pejorative nominalizations for four target adjectives: female, gay, illegal, and poor. We then collect a second corpus of automatically-extracted and POS-tagged, crowd-annotated tweets. For both corpora, we find support for the hypothesis that some adjectives, when nominalized, take on negative meaning. The targeted constructions are non-standard yet widely-used, and part-of-speech taggers mistag some nominal forms as adjectives. We implement a tool called NomCatcher to correct these mistaggings, and find that the same tool is effective for identifying new adjectives subject to transformation via nominalization into abusive language."
}