Toxicity Detection: Does Context Really Matter?

Understand

Moderation is crucial to promoting healthy on-line discussions.

• Although several `toxicity' detection datasets and models have been published, most of them ignore the context of the posts, implicitly assuming that comments maybe judged independently.
• We investigate this assumption by focusing on two questions: (a) does context affect the human judgement, and (b) does conditioning on context improve performance of toxicity detection systems? We experiment with Wikipedia conversations, limiting the notion of context to the previous post in the thread and the discussion title.
• We find that context can both amplify or mitigate the perceived toxicity of posts.