PejorativITy: Disambiguating Pejorative Epithets to Improve Misogyny Detection in Italian Tweets

Arianna Muti, Federico Ruggeri, Cagri Toraman, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Samuel Algherini, Lorenzo Musetti, Silvia Ronchi, Gianmarco Saretto, Caterina Zapparoli


Abstract
Misogyny is often expressed through figurative language. Some neutral words can assume a negative connotation when functioning as pejorative epithets. Disambiguating the meaning of such terms might help the detection of misogyny. In order to address such task, we present PejorativITy, a novel corpus of 1,200 manually annotated Italian tweets for pejorative language at the word level and misogyny at the sentence level. We evaluate the impact of injecting information about disambiguated words into a model targeting misogyny detection. In particular, we explore two different approaches for injection: concatenation of pejorative information and substitution of ambiguous words with univocal terms. Our experimental results, both on our corpus and on two popular benchmarks on Italian tweets, show that both approaches lead to a major classification improvement, indicating that word sense disambiguation is a promising preliminary step for misogyny detection. Furthermore, we investigate LLMs’ understanding of pejorative epithets by means of contextual word embeddings analysis and prompting.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1112
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
12700–12711
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1112
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arianna Muti, Federico Ruggeri, Cagri Toraman, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Samuel Algherini, Lorenzo Musetti, Silvia Ronchi, Gianmarco Saretto, and Caterina Zapparoli. 2024. PejorativITy: Disambiguating Pejorative Epithets to Improve Misogyny Detection in Italian Tweets. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 12700–12711, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
PejorativITy: Disambiguating Pejorative Epithets to Improve Misogyny Detection in Italian Tweets (Muti et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1112.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2024.lrec-main.1112.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.xlsx