Your spouse needs professional help: Determining the Contextual Appropriateness of Messages through Modeling Social Relationships

David Jurgens, Agrima Seth, Jackson Sargent, Athena Aghighi, Michael Geraci


Abstract
Understanding interpersonal communication requires, in part, understanding the social context and norms in which a message is said. However, current methods for identifying offensive content in such communication largely operate independent of context, with only a few approaches considering community norms or prior conversation as context. Here, we introduce a new approach to identifying inappropriate communication by explicitly modeling the social relationship between the individuals. We introduce a new dataset of contextually-situated judgments of appropriateness and show that large language models can readily incorporate relationship information to accurately identify appropriateness in a given context. Using data from online conversations and movie dialogues, we provide insight into how the relationships themselves function as implicit norms and quantify the degree to which context-sensitivity is needed in different conversation settings. Further, we also demonstrate that contextual-appropriateness judgments are predictive of other social factors expressed in language such as condescension and politeness.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.616
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10994–11013
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.616
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.616
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Jurgens, Agrima Seth, Jackson Sargent, Athena Aghighi, and Michael Geraci. 2023. Your spouse needs professional help: Determining the Contextual Appropriateness of Messages through Modeling Social Relationships. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10994–11013, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Your spouse needs professional help: Determining the Contextual Appropriateness of Messages through Modeling Social Relationships (Jurgens et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.acl-long.616.pdf
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 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.acl-long.616.mp4