NAACL 2025system demonstrations0 citations

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"
}
SafeSpeech: A Comprehensive and Interactive Tool for Analysing Sexist and Abusive Language in Conversations · NAACL 2025