Text Detoxification as Style Transfer in English and Hindi

Sourabrata Mukherjee, Akanksha Bansal, Atul Kr. Ojha, John P. McCrae, Ondrej Dusek

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Abstract
This paper focuses on text detoxification, i.e., automatically converting toxic text into nontoxic text. This task contributes to safer and more respectful online communication and can be considered a Text Style Transfer (TST) task, where the text’s style changes while its content is preserved. We present three approaches: (i) knowledge transfer from a similar task (ii) multi-task learning approach, combining sequence-to-sequence modeling with various toxicity classification tasks, and (iii) delete and reconstruct approach. To support our research, we utilize a dataset provided by Dementieva et al. (2021), which contains multiple versions of detoxified texts corresponding to toxic texts. In our experiments, we selected the best variants through expert human annotators, creating a dataset where each toxic sentence is paired with a single, appropriate detoxified version. Additionally, we introduced a small Hindi parallel dataset, aligning with a part of the English dataset, suitable for evaluation purposes. Our results demonstrate that our approach effectively balances text detoxification while preserving the actual content and maintaining fluency.
Anthology ID:
2023.icon-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Goa University, Goa, India
Editors:
Jyoti D. Pawar, Sobha Lalitha Devi
Venue:
ICON
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
NLP Association of India (NLPAI)
Note:
Pages:
133–144
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.icon-1.13
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sourabrata Mukherjee, Akanksha Bansal, Atul Kr. Ojha, John P. McCrae, and Ondrej Dusek. 2023. Text Detoxification as Style Transfer in English and Hindi. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), pages 133–144, Goa University, Goa, India. NLP Association of India (NLPAI).
Cite (Informal):
Text Detoxification as Style Transfer in English and Hindi (Mukherjee et al., ICON 2023)
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