Your spouse needs professional help: Determining the Contextual Appropriateness of Messages through Modeling Social Relationships

David Jurgens, Agrima Seth, Jackson Sargent, Athena Aghighi, Michael Geraci

Main: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics Main-oral Paper

Session 3: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics (Oral)
Conference Room: Pier 2&3
Conference Time: July 11, 09:00-10:15 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Session 3 (13:00-14:15 UTC)
Keywords: human behavior analysis, hate-speech detection, quantiative analyses of news and/or social media
TLDR: Understanding interpersonal communication requires, in part, understanding the social context and norms in which a message is said. However, current methods for identifying offensive content in such communication largely operate independent of context, with only a few approaches considering communi...
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Abstract: Understanding interpersonal communication requires, in part, understanding the social context and norms in which a message is said. However, current methods for identifying offensive content in such communication largely operate independent of context, with only a few approaches considering community norms or prior conversation as context. Here, we introduce a new approach to identifying inappropriate communication by explicitly modeling the social relationship between the individuals. We introduce a new dataset of contextually-situated judgments of appropriateness and show that large language models can readily incorporate relationship information to accurately identify appropriateness in a given context. Using data from online conversations and movie dialogues, we provide insight into how the relationships themselves function as implicit norms and quantify the degree to which context-sensitivity is needed in different conversation settings. Further, we also demonstrate that contextual-appropriateness judgments are predictive of other social factors expressed in language such as condescension and politeness.