senseoffensive

Senseoffensive is a term used in linguistics and NLP to describe evaluating the offensiveness of language by considering word senses and context. The central idea is that whether a string of text is offensive often depends on which sense of a word is activated in a given situation, not merely on the surface form.

Methodology: It combines word sense disambiguation, contextual embeddings, and pragmatics. Researchers typically build sense inventories and annotates corpora for offensiveness tied to specific senses. Systems may produce an offensiveness score or a categorical label, informed by human judgments and policy guidelines.

Applications: content moderation, automated moderation on social platforms, educational tools for language learning, research into hate speech detection.

Challenges: sense disambiguation errors, figurative language, sarcasm, cultural variation, evolving slang. Data biases and inconsistent labeling across communities. Computational overhead.

See also: offensiveness, hate speech, sentiment analysis, word sense disambiguation.