Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection in English and Mandarin

Overview & Synopsis

Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) is a form of harmful language that belittles and assumes pity for vulnerable groups, reinforcing negative societal stereotypes. However, unlike overt hate speech, it is often difficult to detect, even for human judges. This paper proposes a system for the automated detection of PCL. Our first approach uses static word embeddings and a convolutional neural network for classification, while our second approach uses pre-trained BERT embeddings fine-tuned for the PCL task. Our second approach was considerably more successful, and achieved an F1 score of 0.528 over the development set.