Toxicity Detection can be Sensitive to the Conversational Context
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
User posts whose perceived toxicity depends on the conversational context are rare in current toxicity detection datasets. Hence, toxicity detectors trained on existing datasets will also tend to disregard context, making the detection of context-sensitive toxicity harder when it does occur. We construct and publicly release a dataset of 10,000 posts with two kinds of toxicity labels: (i) annotators considered each post with the previous one as context; and (ii) annotators had no additional context. Based on this, we introduce a new task, context sensitivity estimation, which aims to identify posts whose perceived toxicity changes if the context (previous post) is also considered. We then evaluate machine learning systems on this task, showing that classifiers of practical quality can be developed, and we show that data augmentation with knowledge distillation can improve the performance further. Such systems could be used to enhance toxicity detection datasets with more context-dependent posts, or to suggest when moderators should consider the parent posts, which often may be unnecessary and may otherwise introduce significant additional cost.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 25 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2021.
Builds on
25 of 57 references.
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13 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2022: 2; 2023: 2; 2024: 1; 2025: 1.
6 papers.
- 2022Language Generation Models Can Cause Harm: So What Can We Do About It? An Actionable Surveycited by 80
- 2022Characteristics of Harmful Text: Towards Rigorous Benchmarking of Language Modelscited by 49
- 2023KoSBi: A Dataset for Mitigating Social Bias Risks Towards Safer Large Language Model Applicationcited by 24
- 2023A Taxonomy of Rater Disagreements: Surveying Challenges & Opportunities from the Perspective of Annotating Online Toxicitycited by 4
- 2025Protect: Towards Robust Guardrailing Stack for Trustworthy Enterprise LLM Systemscited by 3
- 2024On the Role of Speech Data in Reducing Toxicity Detection Biascited by 2
- 2025Protect: Towards Robust Guardrailing Stack for Trustworthy Enterprise LLM Systems15 Oct 2025
- 2024On the Role of Speech Data in Reducing Toxicity Detection Bias12 Nov 2024
- 2023A Taxonomy of Rater Disagreements: Surveying Challenges & Opportunities from the Perspective of Annotating Online Toxicity7 Nov 2023
- 2023KoSBi: A Dataset for Mitigating Social Bias Risks Towards Safer Large Language Model Application28 May 2023
- 2022Language Generation Models Can Cause Harm: So What Can We Do About It? An Actionable Survey14 Oct 2022
- 2022Characteristics of Harmful Text: Towards Rigorous Benchmarking of Language Models16 Jun 2022
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025Rethinking Toxicity Evaluation in Large Language Models: A Multi-Label Perspective
- 2026ToxiREX: A Dataset on Toxic REasoning in ConteXt
- 2025Something Just Like TRuST : Toxicity Recognition of Span and Target
- 2025Concept-Based Interpretability for Toxicity Detection
- 2025Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Personalized Harmful Content Detection with In-Context Learning
- 2025Understanding and Mitigating Toxicity in Image-Text Pretraining Datasets: A Case Study on LLaVA
- 2025SMARTER: A Data-efficient Framework to Improve Toxicity Detection with Explanation via Self-augmenting Large Language Models
- 2025STEMTOX: From Collaborative Tags to Fine-Grained Toxic Meme Detection via Entropy-Guided Multi-Task Learning