SafeSpeech: A Comprehensive and Interactive Tool for Analysing Sexist and Abusive Language in Conversations
Xingwei Tan, Chen Lyu, Hafiz Muhammad Umer, Sahrish Khan, Mahathi Parvatham, Lois Arthurs, Simon Cullen, Shelley Wilson
Abstract
Detecting toxic language, including sexism, harassment, and abusive behaviour, remains a critical challenge, particularly in its subtle and context-dependent forms. Existing approaches largely focus on isolated message-level classification, overlooking toxicity that emerges across conversational contexts. To promote and enable future research in this direction, we introduce *SafeSpeech*, a comprehensive platform for toxic content detection and analysis that bridges message-level and conversation-level insights. The platform integrates fine-tuned classifiers and large language models (LLMs) to enable multi-granularity detection, toxic-aware conversation summarization, and persona profiling. *SafeSpeech* also incorporates explainability mechanisms, such as perplexity gain analysis, to highlight the linguistic elements driving predictions. Evaluations on benchmark datasets, including EDOS, OffensEval, and HatEval, demonstrate the reproduction of state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks, including fine-grained sexism detection.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{tan-etal-2025-safespeech,
title = "{S}afe{S}peech: A Comprehensive and Interactive Tool for Analysing Sexist and Abusive Language in Conversations",
author = "Tan, Xingwei and
Lyu, Chen and
Umer, Hafiz Muhammad and
Khan, Sahrish and
Parvatham, Mahathi and
Arthurs, Lois and
Cullen, Simon and
Wilson, Shelley and
Jhumka, Arshad and
Pergola, Gabriele",
editor = "Dziri, Nouha and
Ren, Sean (Xiang) and
Diao, Shizhe",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (System Demonstrations)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-demo.31/",
pages = "361--382",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-191-9"
}