The Relevance of Value Systems for Offensive Language Detection

Michael Wiegand, Elisabeth Eder, Josef Ruppenhofer

Abstract: We examine in how far a person’s value system has an impact on their perception of offensiveness. For instance, a scholar is likely to be offended by being accused of reporting unverified claims whereas many non-scholars would not feel that way. Thus, we move away from the assumption that offensiveness can be defined through a universal perspective. Ultimately, such research aims to support personalized approaches to content moderation. Our main contribution is the introduction of a dataset consisting of neutrally-phrased sentences on controversial topics, evaluated by individuals from 4 different value systems. This allows us to identify offensiveness patterns across value systems and conduct classification experiments.