# Searching for PETs: Using Distributional and Sentiment-Based Methods to Find Potentially Euphemistic Terms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10451/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [UCTopic: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Phrase Representations and Topic Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13469/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Euphemism Detection and Identification for Content Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16808/) (2021)
- [CATs are Fuzzy PETs: A Corpus and Analysis of Potentially Euphemistic Terms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02728/) (2022)
- [Euphemistic Phrase Detection by Masked Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04666/) (2021)
- [A diachronic evaluation of gender asymmetry in euphemism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02083/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [A Report on the Euphemisms Detection Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13327/) (2022)
- [EUREKA: EUphemism Recognition Enhanced through Knn-based methods and Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12846/) (2022)
- [Exploring Euphemism Detection in Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12926/) (2022)
- [Detecting Euphemisms with Literal Descriptions and Visual Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04576/) (2022)
- [FEED PETs: Further Experimentation and Expansion on the Disambiguation of Potentially Euphemistic Terms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00217/) (2023)
- [MEDs for PETs: Multilingual Euphemism Disambiguation for Potentially Euphemistic Terms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14526/) (2024)
- [Turkish Delights: a Dataset on Turkish Euphemisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13040/) (2024)
- [When Does Language Transfer Help? Sequential Fine-Tuning for Cross-Lingual Euphemism Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11831/) (2025)
- [TEDB System Description to a Shared Task on Euphemism Detection 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06602/) (2023)
- [Covering Cracks in Content Moderation: Delexicalized Distant Supervision for Illicit Drug Jargon Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14926/) (2025)
- [Keyword-Oriented Multimodal Modeling for Euphemism Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21504/) (2025)
- [When Semantic Overlap Is Not Enough: Cross-Lingual Euphemism Transfer Between Turkish and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16957/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a linguistically driven proof of concept for finding potentially euphemistic terms, or PETs. Acknowledging that PETs tend to be commonly used expressions for a certain range of sensitive topics, we make use of distributional similarities to select and filter phrase candidates from a sentence and rank them using a set of simple sentiment-based metrics. We present the results of our approach tested on a corpus of sentences containing euphemisms, demonstrating its efficacy for detecting single and multi-word PETs from a broad range of topics. We also discuss future potential for sentiment-based methods on this task.