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.- Anthology ID:
- W17-3014
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language Online
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Vancouver, BC, Canada
- Editors:
- Zeerak Waseem, Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, Dirk Hovy, Joel Tetreault
- Venue:
- ALW
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 91–100
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W17-3014
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W17-3014
- Cite (ACL):
- Alexis Palmer, Melissa Robinson, and Kristy K. Phillips. 2017. Illegal is not a Noun: Linguistic Form for Detection of Pejorative Nominalizations. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language Online, pages 91–100, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Illegal is not a Noun: Linguistic Form for Detection of Pejorative Nominalizations (Palmer et al., ALW 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/W17-3014.pdf