COBRA Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Effects and Harms of Offensive Statements

Understand

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• Understanding the harms and offensiveness of statements requires reasoning about the social and situational context in which statements are made.
• For example, the utterance "your English is very good" may implicitly signal an insult when uttered by a white man to a non-white colleague, but uttered by an ESL teacher to their student would be interpreted as a genuine compliment.
• Such contextual factors have been largely ignored by previous approaches to toxic language detection.