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ToxiCloakCN: Evaluating Robustness of Offensive Language Detection in Chinese with Cloaking Perturbations

Yunze Xiao, Yujia Hu, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Roy Ka-Wei Lee


Abstract
Detecting hate speech and offensive language is essential for maintaining a safe and respectful digital environment. This study examines the limitations of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in identifying offensive content within systematically perturbed data, with a focus on Chinese, a language particularly susceptible to such perturbations. We introduce ToxiCloakCN, an enhanced dataset derived from ToxiCN, augmented with homophonic substitutions and emoji transformations, to test the robustness of LLMs against these cloaking perturbations. Our findings reveal that existing models significantly underperform in detecting offensive content when these perturbations are applied. We provide an in-depth analysis of how different types of offensive content are affected by these perturbations and explore the alignment between human and model explanations of offensiveness. Our work highlights the urgent need for more advanced techniques in offensive language detection to combat the evolving tactics used to evade detection mechanisms.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.345
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6012–6025
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.345
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.345
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yunze Xiao, Yujia Hu, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, and Roy Ka-Wei Lee. 2024. ToxiCloakCN: Evaluating Robustness of Offensive Language Detection in Chinese with Cloaking Perturbations. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6012–6025, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ToxiCloakCN: Evaluating Robustness of Offensive Language Detection in Chinese with Cloaking Perturbations (Xiao et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.345.pdf