The perceived toxicity of language can vary based on someone’s identity and beliefs, but this variation is often ignored when collecting toxic language datasets, resulting in dataset and model biases. We seek to understand the *who*, *why*, and *what* behind biases in toxicity annotations. In two online studies with demographically and politically diverse participants, we investigate the effect of annotator identities (*who*) and beliefs (*why*), drawing from social psychology research about hate speech, free speech, racist beliefs, political leaning, and more. We disentangle *what* is annotated as toxic by considering posts with three characteristics: anti-Black language, African American English (AAE) dialect, and vulgarity. Our results show strong associations between annotator identity and beliefs and their ratings of toxicity. Notably, more conservative annotators and those who scored highly on our scale for racist beliefs were less likely to rate anti-Black language as toxic, but more likely to rate AAE as toxic. We additionally present a case study illustrating how a popular toxicity detection system’s ratings inherently reflect only specific beliefs and perspectives. Our findings call for contextualizing toxicity labels in social variables, which raises immense implications for toxic language annotation and detection.

Personal attributes represent structured information about a person, such as their hobbies, pets, family, likes and dislikes. We introduce the tasks of extracting and inferring personal attributes from human-human dialogue, and analyze the linguistic demands of these tasks. To meet these challenges, we introduce a simple and extensible model that combines an autoregressive language model utilizing constrained attribute generation with a discriminative reranker. Our model outperforms strong baselines on extracting personal attributes as well as inferring personal attributes that are not contained verbatim in utterances and instead requires commonsense reasoning and lexical inferences, which occur frequently in everyday conversation. Finally, we demonstrate the benefit of incorporating personal attributes in social chit-chat and task-oriented dialogue settings.

Biased associations have been a challenge in the development of classifiers for detecting toxic language, hindering both fairness and accuracy. As potential solutions, we investigate recently introduced debiasing methods for text classification datasets and models, as applied to toxic language detection. Our focus is on lexical (e.g., swear words, slurs, identity mentions) and dialectal markers (specifically African American English). Our comprehensive experiments establish that existing methods are limited in their ability to prevent biased behavior in current toxicity detectors. We then propose an automatic, dialect-aware data correction method, as a proof-of-concept. Despite the use of synthetic labels, this method reduces dialectal associations with toxicity. Overall, our findings show that debiasing a model trained on biased toxic language data is not as effective as simply relabeling the data to remove existing biases.

Although large-scale pretrained language models, such as BERT and RoBERTa, have achieved superhuman performance on in-distribution test sets, their performance suffers on out-of-distribution test sets (e.g., on contrast sets). Building contrast sets often requires human-expert annotation, which is expensive and hard to create on a large scale. In this work, we propose a Linguistically-Informed Transformation (LIT) method to automatically generate contrast sets, which enables practitioners to explore linguistic phenomena of interests as well as compose different phenomena. Experimenting with our method on SNLI and MNLI shows that current pretrained language models, although being claimed to contain sufficient linguistic knowledge, struggle on our automatically generated contrast sets. Furthermore, we improve models’ performance on the contrast sets by applying LIT to augment the training data, without affecting performance on the original data.

It is well-understood that different algorithms, training processes, and corpora produce different word embeddings. However, less is known about the relation between different embedding spaces, i.e. how far different sets of em-beddings deviate from each other. In this paper, we propose a novel metric called Relative Pairwise Inner Product Distance (RPD) to quantify the distance between different sets of word embeddings. This unitary-invariant metric has a unified scale for comparing different sets of word embeddings. Based on the properties of RPD, we study the relations of word embeddings of different algorithms systematically and investigate the influence of different training processes and corpora. The results shed light on the poorly understood word embeddings and justify RPD as a measure of the distance of embedding space.

Text alignment finds application in tasks such as citation recommendation and plagiarism detection. Existing alignment methods operate at a single, predefined level and cannot learn to align texts at, for example, sentence and document levels. We propose a new learning approach that equips previously established hierarchical attention encoders for representing documents with a cross-document attention component, enabling structural comparisons across different levels (document-to-document and sentence-to-document). Our component is weakly supervised from document pairs and can align at multiple levels. Our evaluation on predicting document-to-document relationships and sentence-to-document relationships on the tasks of citation recommendation and plagiarism detection shows that our approach outperforms previously established hierarchical, attention encoders based on recurrent and transformer contextualization that are unaware of structural correspondence between documents.