Multilingual and Explainable Text Detoxification with Parallel Corpora
Daryna Dementieva, Nikolay Babakov, Amit Ronen, Abinew Ali Ayele, Naquee Rizwan, Florian Schneider, Xintong Wang, Seid Muhie Yimam
Abstract
Even with various regulations in place across countries and social media platforms (Government of India, 2021; European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022), digital abusive speech remains a significant issue. One potential approach to address this challenge is automatic text detoxification, a text style transfer (TST) approach that transforms toxic language into a more neutral or non-toxic form. To date, the availability of parallel corpora for the text detoxification task (Logacheva et al., 2022; Atwell et al., 2022; Dementieva et al., 2024a) has proven to be crucial for state-of-the-art approaches. With this work, we extend parallel text detoxification corpus to new languages—German, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and Amharic—testing in the extensive multilingual setup TST baselines. Next, we conduct the first of its kind an automated, explainable analysis of the descriptive features of both toxic and non-toxic sentences, diving deeply into the nuances, similarities, and differences of toxicity and detoxification across 9 languages. Finally, based on the obtained insights, we experiment with a novel text detoxification method inspired by the Chain-of-Thoughts reasoning approach, enhancing the prompting process through clustering on relevant descriptive attributes.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{dementieva-etal-2025-multilingual,
title = "Multilingual and Explainable Text Detoxification with Parallel Corpora",
author = "Dementieva, Daryna and
Babakov, Nikolay and
Ronen, Amit and
Ayele, Abinew Ali and
Rizwan, Naquee and
Schneider, Florian and
Wang, Xintong and
Yimam, Seid Muhie and
Moskovskiy, Daniil and
Stakovskii, Elisei and
Kaufman, Eran and
Elnagar, Ashraf and
Mukherjee, Animesh and
Panchenko, Alexander",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.535/",
pages = "7998--8025"
}