# Towards A Friendly Online Community: An Unsupervised Style Transfer Framework for Profanity Redaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.00403 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00403/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Controlled Text Generation with Natural Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14293/) (2023)
- [Text Detoxification using Large Pre-trained Neural Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08914/) (2021)
- [Proactively Reducing the Hate Intensity of Online Posts via Hate Speech Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04007/) (2022)
- [Exploring Methods for Cross-lingual Text Style Transfer: The Case of Text Detoxification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13937/) (2023)
- [A Call for Standardization and Validation of Text Style Transfer Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00539/) (2023)
- [Methods for Detoxification of Texts for the Russian Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09052/) (2021)
- [Transductive Learning for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07812/) (2021)
- [From Theories on Styles to their Transfer in Text: Bridging the Gap with a Hierarchical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15871/) (2021)
- [LLM in the Loop: Creating the ParaDeHate Dataset for Hate Speech Detoxification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01484/) (2025)
- [Learning from Response not Preference: A Stackelberg Approach for LLM Detoxification using Non-parallel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20298/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Text Toxicity with Counterfactual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09948/) (2024)
- [Gradient-guided Unsupervised Text Style Transfer via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00469/) (2022)
- [HatePRISM: Policies, Platforms, and Research Integration. Advancing NLP for Hate Speech Proactive Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04350/) (2025)
- [BanglaNirTox: A Large-scale Parallel Corpus for Explainable AI in Bengali Text Detoxification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01512/) (2025)
- [Analyzing Bias in False Refusal Behavior of Large Language Models for Hate Speech Detoxification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08668/) (2026)
- [Demarked: A Strategy for Enhanced Abusive Speech Moderation through Counterspeech, Detoxification, and Message Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19543/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Text Style Transfer: Applications and Ethical Implications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16737/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Offensive and abusive language is a pressing problem on social media platforms. In this work, we propose a method for transforming offensive comments, statements containing profanity or offensive language, into non-offensive ones. We design a RETRIEVE, GENERATE and EDIT unsupervised style transfer pipeline to redact the offensive comments in a word-restricted manner while maintaining a high level of fluency and preserving the content of the original text. We extensively evaluate our method's performance and compare it to previous style transfer models using both automatic metrics and human evaluations. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other models on human evaluations and is the only approach that consistently performs well on all automatic evaluation metrics.