# Methods for Detoxification of Texts for the Russian Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09052 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09052/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04009/) (2017)
- [Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09666/) (2019)
- [Style Transfer from Non-Parallel Text by Cross-Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09655/) (2017)
- [Dear Sir or Madam, May I introduce the GYAFC Dataset: Corpus, Benchmarks and Metrics for Formality Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06535/) (2018)
- [Delete, Retrieve, Generate: A Simple Approach to Sentiment and Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06437/) (2018)
- [Reformulating Unsupervised Style Transfer as Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05700/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Text Style Transfer: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00416/) (2020)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning for Non-Parallel Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04339/) (2018)
- [Adaptation of Deep Bidirectional Multilingual Transformers for Russian Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07213/) (2019)
- [Conditional BERT Contextual Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06705/) (2018)
- [Automatically Neutralizing Subjective Bias in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09709/) (2019)
- [Politeness Transfer: A Tag and Generate Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14257/) (2020)
- [Fighting Offensive Language on Social Media with Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07685/) (2018)
- ["Mask and Infill" : Applying Masked Language Model to Sentiment Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08039/) (2019)
- [Load What You Need: Smaller Versions of Multilingual BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05609/) (2020)
- [Style-transfer and Paraphrase: Looking for a Sensible Semantic Similarity Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05001/) (2020)
- [Towards A Friendly Online Community: An Unsupervised Style Transfer Framework for Profanity Redaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00403/) (2020)
- [Towards non-toxic landscapes: Automatic toxic comment detection using DNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08395/) (2019)
- [Fortifying Toxic Speech Detectors Against Veiled Toxicity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03154/) (2020)
- [What is wrong with style transfer for texts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04365/) (2018)
- [Improved Neural Text Attribute Transfer with Non-parallel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09395/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [MERA: A Comprehensive LLM Evaluation in Russian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04531/) (2024)
- [Exploring Methods for Cross-lingual Text Style Transfer: The Case of Text Detoxification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13937/) (2023)
- [MultiParaDetox: Extending Text Detoxification with Parallel Data to New Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02037/) (2024)
- [CleanComedy: Creating Friendly Humor through Generative Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09203/) (2024)
- [RuBia: A Russian Language Bias Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17553/) (2024)
- [Exploring Cross-lingual Textual Style Transfer with Large Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02252/) (2022)
- [Russian Texts Detoxification with Levenshtein Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13638/) (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)
- [Demarked: A Strategy for Enhanced Abusive Speech Moderation through Counterspeech, Detoxification, and Message Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19543/) (2024)
- [Qwerty AI: Explainable Automated Age Rating and Content Safety Assessment for Russian-Language Screenplays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04211/) (2025)
- [Text Detoxification in isiXhosa and Yor`ub'a: A Cross-Lingual Machine Learning Approach for Low-Resource African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05624/) (2026)
- [Comparison of Modern Multilingual Text Embedding Techniques for Hate Speech Detection Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14907/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the first study of automatic detoxification of Russian texts to combat offensive language. Such a kind of textual style transfer can be used, for instance, for processing toxic content in social media. While much work has been done for the English language in this field, it has never been solved for the Russian language yet. We test two types of models - unsupervised approach based on BERT architecture that performs local corrections and supervised approach based on pretrained language GPT-2 model - and compare them with several baselines. In addition, we describe evaluation setup providing training datasets and metrics for automatic evaluation. The results show that the tested approaches can be successfully used for detoxification, although there is room for improvement.