Offensive Words Research Articles

Interreligious hate speech as a source of insecurity in Nigeria

This article has assessed Interreligious Hate Speech as a Source of Insecurity in Nigeria. It concentrates mainly on Christianity and Islamic religions’ hate speeches against themselves using the Speech Act Theory. The speech act theory according to Austin (1978) has three assumptions; locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts which explain that a speech made is referential, performative and result effective respectively. The research uses the theory with the intention that it covers what the hateful speech (referential) is, the reaction of the person to whom the hate speech is referred to (performative) and the consequences of the reaction of the victim (result) which in most cases are attacks. The work uses descriptive research design and its data is achieved through an observational method which sourced data from both primary and secondary sources (documented materials) and the data is analysed using a qualitative technique. In relation to the related existing literature, the work has achieved the reality of the struggle between Christians and Muslims in their battles through offensive words (hate speeches) which culminate to crisis in Nigeria. This study points out the linguistic implication of crisis/insecurity in Nigeria through religious people and suggests that government should put in place control mechanisms that can regulate the use of language to curtail hate speech that degenerate into insecurity in Nigeria.

Impoliteness among slaves - An epigraphic evidence for insults from a Graeco-Roman bilingual context of Southern Italy

A threefold inscription scratched on a tile found in the surroundings of Reggio Calabria, dating back to late 2nd century BCE, evidences for insults addressed to slaves employed in a local pottery. Both context and abusive terms point to a controversy broken out among colleagues within the place of work. The offensive words reveal a Greek-Latin bilingualism, in which Latin plays the role of language first learned and used in everyday speeches, as well as the high degree of literacy of slaves, confirmed by similar manufactures with Latin and Oscan inscriptions. Nevertheless the threefold inscription raises some questions about text cohesiveness and, more importantly, the number of the addressees implied by the sequence of appellatives in vocative case, which is the key point for understanding the text as a whole.

Public Attention and Sentiment toward Intimate Partner Violence Based on Weibo in China: A Text Mining Approach.

The mobile internet has resulted in intimate partner violence (IPV) events not being viewed as interpersonal and private issues. Such events become public events in the social network environment. IPV has become a public health issue of widespread concern. It is a challenge to obtain systematic and detailed data using questionnaires and interviews in traditional Chinese culture, because of face-saving and the victim’s shame factors. However, online comments about specific IPV events on social media provide rich data in understanding the public’s attitudes and emotions towards IPV. By applying text mining and sentiment analysis to the field of IPV, this study involved construction of a Chinese IPV sentiment dictionary and a complete research framework. We analyzed the trends of the Chinese public’s emotional evolution concerning IPV events from the perspectives of a time series as well as geographic space and social media. The results show that the anonymity of social networks and the guiding role of opinion leaders result in traditional cultural factors such as face-saving and family shame for IPV events being no longer applicable, leading to the spiral of an anti-silence effect. Meanwhile, in the process of public emotional communication, anger often overwhelms reason, and the spiral of silence remains in effect in social media. In addition, there are offensive words used in the IPV event texts that indicate misogyny in emotional, sexual, economic and psychological abuse. Fortunately, mainstream media, as crucial opinion leaders in the social network, can have a positive role in guiding public opinion, improving people’s ability to judge the validity of network information, and formulating people’s rational behaviour.

Denigrate Comment Detection in Low-Resource Hindi Language Using Attention-Based Residual Networks

Cyberspace has been recognized as a conducive environment for use of various hostile, direct, and indirect behavioural tactics to target individuals or groups. Denigration is one of the most frequently used cyberbullying ploys to actively damage, humiliate, and disparage the online reputation of target by sending, posting, or publishing cruel rumours, gossip, and untrue statements. Previous pertinent studies report detecting profane, vulgar, and offensive words primarily in the English language. This research puts forward a model to detect online denigration bullying in low-resource Hindi language using attention residual networks. The proposed model Hindi Denigrate Comment–Attention Residual Network (HDC-ARN) intends to uncover defamatory posts (denigrate comments) written in Hindi language which stake and vilify a person or an entity in public. Data with 942 denigrate comments and 1499 non-denigrate comments is scraped using certain hashtags from two recent trending events in India: Tablighi Jamaat spiked Covid-19 (April 2020, Event 1) and Sushant Singh Rajput Death (June 2020: Event 2). Only text-based features, that is, the actual content of the post, are considered. The pre-trained word embedding for Hindi language from fastText is used. The model has three ResNet blocks with an attention layer that generates a post vector for a single input, which is passed through a sigmoid activation function to get the final output as either denigrate (positive class) or non-denigrate (negative class). An F-1 score of 0.642 is achieved on the dataset.

The “F Word” Among Bilingual Children in Their First Language

A new phenomenon comes up early today that the F word or fuck has been becoming popular among children regardless of the setting. The study examines the children’s perception towards the F word in two cities in East Java: Surabaya (a metropolitan city) and Jombang (a sub-urban city). To investigates F words' usage among fifty children eight – fourteen years old in these two places, a descriptive qualitative method was employed by conducting interviews and observation. The result shows six perceptions through the F word: impolite word, an angry expression, a friendly word, a joke, and an offensive word. The way in which they acquire the F word varies, as does the purpose and the function of the F word as a wave of anger, sarcasm, conformity, solidarity, and frustration.

Smart detection of offensive words in social media using the soundex algorithm and permuterm index

Offensive posts in the social media that are inappropriate for a specific age, level of maturity, or impression are quite often destined more to unadult than adult participants. Nowadays, the growth in the number of the masked offensive words in the social media is one of the ethically challenging problems. Thus, there has been growing interest in development of methods that can automatically detect posts with such words. This study aimed at developing a method that can detect the masked offensive words in which partial alteration of the word may trick the conventional monitoring systems when being posted on social media. The proposed method progresses in a series of phases that can be broken down into a pre-processing phase, which includes filtering, tokenization, and stemming; offensive word extraction phase, which relies on using the soundex algorithm and permuterm index; and a post-processing phase that classifies the users’ posts in order to highlight the offensive content. Accordingly, the method detects the masked offensive words in the written text, thus forbidding certain types of offensive words from being published. Results of evaluation of performance of the proposed method indicate a 99% accuracy of detection of offensive words.

Enabling Robots to Distinguish Between Aggressive and Joking Attitudes

During a conversation, the meaning of an utterance may drastically change depending on the attitude of the speaker. For example, offensive words may be used “seriously” to threaten or “jokingly” to tease. However, robots do not have yet the capacity to understand such nuance. Therefore, we have developed an attitude recognition system that allows robots to evaluate whether an utterance with an offensive lexical content is aggressive (serious) or a joke. First, we created a data set of 7199 utterances (16 participants) that reproduces the different attitudes toward robots that we observed in field experiments. Second, we implemented voice quality features for breathy voice, creaky voice (or vocal fry), and pressed voice analysis, combined them with conventional prosodic features, and developed a neural network architecture to estimate the “perceived level of joking” of the utterances. Finally, we compared the performance of the proposed method to standard approaches for speech emotion recognition. We show that the combination of voice quality and prosodic features we proposed outperforms at this task the conventional neural network used for speech emotion recognition. The proposed system predicts the “perceived level of joking” of an utterance with an accuracy comparable to what a human would guess.

Retitling, Cultural Appropriation, and Aboriginal Title

Abstract In 2018, the Art Gallery of Ontario retitled a painting by Emily Carr which contained an offensive word. Controversy ensued, with some arguing that unsanctioned changes to a work’s title infringe upon artists’ moral and free speech rights. Others argued that such a change serves to whitewash legacies of racism and cultural genocide. In this paper, I show that these concerns are unfounded. The first concern is not supported by law or the history of our titling practices; and the second concern misses the mark by ignoring the gallery’s substantial efforts to avoid just such an outcome. Picking up on a suggestion from Loretta Todd, I argue that we can use Aboriginal Title as a model for thinking about the harms perpetuated by cultural appropriation, and the practices we should adopt to mitigate them.

Causality between Video Games and Cognitive Aggression

Previous research has shown that violent video games increase aggressive thoughts, feelings, and physical arousal associated with aggression. Hardcore video game live broadcast has become a trend among gamers, and the effect of violent video game live broadcast can be close to reality. However, there is very little research on the impact of streaming video games. Current research tests the impact of streaming video games on aggressiveness levels. Participants were randomly assigned to watch one of two video game broadcasts, each broadcast for 5 minutes and were asked to complete Buss & Perry Aggression Scale and Word Knowledge Challenge. A two-way analysis of variance was performed between subjects whose empathy type (violent or non-violent) was the independent variable and gender was the predictor. These include the sum of physical attacks, verbal attacks, anger and hostility, and age. The dependent variable measures the availability of aggressive thoughts in people’s cognitive abilities and is determined by the words completed in the word completion task. The basic main effect of transmission type individuals who watched broadcasts of violent video games showed a higher percentage of offensive words at word completion. Gender has little effect on the percentage of offensive words completed; however, after controlling for the nature of the live broadcast, males are more aggressive than females in live broadcasts of violent video games. Regarding the proportion of offensive words, there is a significant correlation between gender and the type of transmission. In particular, the proportion of offensive words uttered by men in the violent transmission is higher.

Zniewaga jako akt mowy w świetle danych językowych i przepisów prawnych

The author of the work analyzes insults as a speech act. She shows similarities and differences between indignity, invective, abuse, defamation – speech acts with the same general intention: harming someone in an act of communications, insulting someone by word. Acts of verbal (and active) insults are assessed according to many criteria: moral (since it is a violation of personal dignity and moral value belonging to every person), social (as an offense against ethical and cultural norms accepted in a given society), legal (specified in art. 216) and linguistic, because they are made by using offensive words.

Detection and Identification of Obfuscated Obscene Language with Character Level Transformers

We present O-Norm (Offense Normalizer), a system for normalizing offensive words and phrases by reversing user-created obfuscations. O-Norm is intended to be a preprocessing tool for pipelines that run on user-created text, particularly those tasks where obscenities may be of significant value such as sentiment, toxicity, and abuse detection. O-Norm is constructed with a purely generated, context-free dataset derived from a curse dictionary. The generative dataset allows O-Norm to be flexible to the addition of new words as language adapts, and also allows it to be readily retrained in other Latin alphabet-based languages as it does not require manual annotations to train. O-Norm is based on a character-level, transformer network which attempts de-obfuscation only on out-of-vocabulary (OOV) tokens. In an 80/20 train-test split, O-Norm achieves an F1 score of 89.6% over 141 curses in a generated dataset with 2.16 million unique training points. An inspection of O-Norm’s output on a sample of social media posts from Kaggle’s Jigsaw corpus reveals accuracy of 95.7% on de-obfuscating transformations in toxic user-created text.

Use of offensive language in human-artificial intelligence chatbot interaction: The effects of ethical ideology, social competence, and perceived humanlikeness

This study examined the factors that affect artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot users' use of profanity and offensive words, employing the concepts of ethical ideology, social competence, and perceived humanlikeness of chatbot. The study also looked into users' liking of chatbots' responses to the users' utterance of profanity and offensive words. Using a national survey (N = 645), the study found that users' idealism orientation was a significant factor in explaining use of such offensive language. In addition, users with high idealism revealed liking of chatbots' active intervention, whereas those with high relativism displayed liking of chatbots' reactive responses. Moreover, users’ perceived humanlikeness of chatbot increased their likelihood of using offensive words targeting dislikable acquaintances, racial/ethnic groups, and political parties. These findings are expected to fill the gap between the current use of AI chatbots and the lack of empirical studies examining language use.

False friends and lexical borrowing: A linguistic analysis of false friends between English and Arabic

Abstract This theoretical study aims at raising awareness of the existence of lexical false friends (FFs) in English and Arabic as genetically unrelated languages. It also provides a general categorization for FFs from a semantic point of view. A sample of more than fifty FF pairs is examined by contrasting their form, pronunciation and meaning. The analysis reveals that English Arabic FFs are of two types: Chance FFs (occur by coincidence) and semantic FFs(exist via lexical borrowing), the former being more frequent than the latter. This taxonomy is in line with those introduced by Chamizo-DomA­nguez (2008) and Roca-Varela (2015). Semantic FFs can be total (due to semantic shift, ellipsis, or figurative extension) or partial (through the process of semantic narrowing). Chance FFs are more problematic in the sense that they cause various degrees of embarrassment and confusion due to the fact that some constituents of FF pairs involve taboo and offensive words. Thus, such lexical FFs are considered potential agents that may create misunderstanding, miscommunication and confusion among L2 learners.

Strategies of Subtitling the Word Fuck in The Wolf of Wall Street Movie

To determine the appropriate strategy for the translation of the word fuck and its variants in audio visual translation is indeed problematic. On the one hand, the translator is required to maintain the beauty of the literary value as reflected in the dialogues, including the usage of offensive swear words; on the other hand, he is obliged to comply with the provisions stipulated in government regulation number 13 year 2014 concerning film censorship agency, especially paragraph 6 article 25 which forbids the usage of vulgar, offensive, racist words that have the potential to ignite public unrest. This research is intended to investigate the choice of translation strategy made by the translator. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative using data in the form of the word fuck and its variants with The Wolf of Wall Street movie as the data source. This study is also intended to compare the results of a similar study conducted by Hawel (2019) which is about the strategy of audiovisual translation from English to Arabic. The results showed that there are similarities in the frequency of the strategies used, namely omission and softening strategies, which reached 75% and 25% respectively in Hawel's research (2019), and omission and mollification strategies which reached 72.9% and 27.1% consecutively in this study. The word mollification in this research is similar to the word softening in Hawel's (2019).

‘Bad language’ in the Nordics: profanity and gender in a social media corpus

ABSTRACT This study looks at the relative frequency of ‘bad language’ according to gender in Nordic languages and in English in a 210-million-token corpus of messages by 18,686 Nordic Twitter users. For the Nordic languages, more than 19,000 ‘bad-language’ word forms were compiled on the basis of usage note annotations in major Nordic-language dictionaries. The most frequent terms overall are swear words, and while males use more of these items on average, the gender difference is less pronounced for English words. For potentially offensive words in the Nordic languages, males make more use of traditional profanities associated with the Devil, religion, and blasphemy. Both genders make more use of profanities when tweeting to people of their own gender. The study provides empirical evidence for a small gender-based discrepancy in the use of profanity in social media in the Nordic languages, mirroring results previously found in corpus-based studies of English-language data. The results are interpreted in light of previous findings as evidence for a gendered difference in sensitivity toward the use of language that could potentially be offensive.

Euphemism Used by Pro and Cons Speakers in Trans 7 Show "Mata Najwa"

This research analyzed the euphemism used by pro and cons speakers in Trans 7 Show Mata Najwa by using Warren, forms of euphemism and Leech, types of meaning theories. The researcher used descriptive qualitative research method. The data in this research was the video’s script of Mata Najwa that downloaded from 7 episodes in YouTube. After analyzing the seven episodes, forms of euphemism by pro speakers found are 1 slang, 1 loan word, 1 particularization, and 3 implication while by cons speakers are 1 derivation, 2 slang, 2 abbreviations, 4 loan words, 5 particularizations, 1 implication, and 2 metaphor. On the other hand, types of meaning by pro speakers found are 1 conceptual meaning, 3 connotative meaning and 1 affective meaning. While by cons speakers are 7 conceptual meaning, 7 connotative meaning, 1 social meaning, 2 affective meaning, and 1 reflected meaning. The result of the study reveals that the dominant form by pro speaker is implication and the most dominant form by cons speaker is particularization. While connotative meaning was the dominant type by pro and conceptual and connotative meaning was the most dominant type by cons speakers of usage types of meaning in Mata Najwa. The differences of using euphemism by pro and cons speakers is that cons speakers use more euphemism in their conversations in order to avoid using the rude or offensive word, also to avoid the loss of face of the speaker, the hearer or the people which is being talked.

Gender-related differences in the use and perception of verbal insults: the Bosnian perspective

Abstract The paper explores potential gender-linked differences in the use and perception of insulting language among Bosnian university students. The respondents were asked to provide one-word answers to four questions about the worst male-directed and female-directed insults, and about one-word descriptions of a male and female person who they view as the most detestable. The results indicate that the male and female respondents have a similar perception of the worst male-directed (lack of masculinity) and, to a lesser extent, femaledirected insults (sexual looseness). Surprisingly, insults of homosexual nature, as well as those pertaining to being unethical and physically unattractive were rarely mentioned. The results also reveal significant gender -of-insulter differences in the use of offensive words in reference to the most disliked person, as well as the tendency by the respondents of both genders to avoid using those insults that they perceive as the harshest.

Marathi Translation and Linguistic Validation of an Updated European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer Quality of Life Module for Head and Neck.

Aim This study was aimed to translate an updated European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) quality of life module for head and neck (EORTC QLQ-H&N43) in grammatically and conceptually acceptable Marathi language and its linguistic validation. Materials and Methods Approval was obtained from the Institutional Ethics Committee. The permission for translation was obtained from the EORTC translation unit (TU). The EORTC guidelines for the translation were followed to form a translation for pilot testing which was administered to 10 Marathi speaking head and neck squamous cell cancer (HNSCC) patients who gave informed written consent for the participation in the study. Patients were interviewed personally. The final Marathi translation was prepared and sent to EORTC TU for approval. Statistical analysis was performed using SYSTAT version 12 by Cranes software, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. Results After getting permission, the translation files were received from EORTC TU, including Marathi EORTC QLQ-H&N35 for reference. Two forward translations, reconciled translation, back translations, first interim translation, translation for proof editing, and second interim translation (SIT) were prepared. This SIT was pilot tested in 10 Marathi-speaking HNSCC patients. Each patient was interviewed regarding difficulty in answering, confusing or offensive word, and reframing sentence. The questionnaire was well understood by patients reflecting its linguistic validity. After incorporating the changes as per the patient’s interview, updated translation was prepared and sent to EORTC TU which was accepted and approved by EORTC. The psychometric analysis of pilot testing showed that the questionnaire is acceptable. Conclusion Marathi translation of EORTC QLQ-H&N43 is well accepted and understandable. It can be used for future studies.

Proceso de adaptación cultural del “Questionnaire for Assesing the Childbirth Experience (QACE)”

Introducción: Las experiencias negativas durante el parto se han asociado con desempoderamiento de la mujer, depresión postparto, trastorno por estrés postraumático y bajas tasas de lactancia maternal, entre otros. El Questionnaire for Assessing the Childbirth Experience (QACE) es una herramienta de 23 ítems útil para identificar mujeres que han tenido una mala experiencia en su proceso de parto y evitar así futuras complicaciones en embarazos posteriores o en la relación de pareja.Objetivo: El objetivo general consiste en adaptar el Questionnaire for Assessing the Childbirth Experience (QACE) a la población española y obtener sus características psicométricas.Metodología: El proceso de adaptación cultural ha consistido en la traducción y retro traducción al español, evaluación de la equivalencia conceptual por un comité de jueces, evaluación de la comprensibilidad y una entrevista cognitiva a un grupo de mujeres puérperas. Las características psicométricas se han obtenido mediante el análisis factorial, los test de Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) y Bartlett y el alfa de Cronbach.Resultados: Tras el proceso de adaptación transcultural, el grupo de expertos realizó las modificaciones necesarias para conseguir una mayor compresión del cuestionario en la población española, evitar malentendidos y palabras ofensivas en la lengua de destino. Se necesitaron 138 participantes para obtener el análisis factorial. El KMO (0,838) y el test de Bartlett (p < 0,001) confirmaron la adecuación del análisis factorial y el grafico de sedimentación mostró 6 factores con un poder predictivo del 73,75% del total de la varianza. La consistencia interna se obtuvo mediante un alfa de Cronbach de 0,896.Conclusiones: Los datos obtenidos en este estudio demuestran que la versión española del QACE es una herramienta válida y fiable para medir la experiencia en el nacimiento en la población española. Background: Negative experiences during delivery are associated with women disempowerment, postpartum depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and low breastfeeding rates. The Questionnaire for Assessing the Childbirth Experience (QACE) is a 23-item screening tool useful for discovering women with a negative experience in their birth process and avoids future complications in following pregnancies or couple's relationships. Objective: The general objective is to adapt the Questionnaire for Assessing the Childbirth Experience (QACE) to the Spanish population and to obtain its psychometric characteristics.Methodology: The cultural adaptation process consisted of forwarding translation and back translation into Spanish, conceptual equivalence evaluation by a committee of judges, comprehensibility evaluation and cognitive interview to a postpartum group. Psychometric characteristics were obtained throughout the factorial analysis, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett’s test of sphericity and Cronbach alpha level.Results: After complete the adaptation process, the committee of judges made several adjustments to achieve a better comprehension in the Spanish population, avoid misunderstandings or offensive words in the target language. 138 participants were needed to calculate factor analysis. The KMO (0.838) and Bartlett test (p < 0.001) confirmed the adequacy of factor analysis and the Scree plot showed 6 factors with the predictive power of 73.75% supported total variance. Internal consistency was assured using a Cronbach α of 0.896.Conclusions: Data from this study demonstrate that the Spanish version of QACE is a valid and reliable measure of childbirth experience in the Spanish population.

Revisiting euphemisation strategies for English to Indonesian subtitle context

Character equivalence and offensive word rank in subtitling context are understudied on the previous studies on euphemisation strategies. The exclusion of these two concerns leaves the prior constructed euphemisation strategies unable to explain how shifts on narrative identity might occur and how taboo words are functionally negotiated. In addressing this issue, the study investigates the relationship between offensive word levels with character equivalence and narrative identity, types of euphemisation strategies, and the strategies' implementation. The data were collected from the English and Indonesian versions of four films containing taboo words, which were analyzed by applying the theories of offensiveness rank by Ofcom, constructed in English as a foreign language context, and character equivalence by Petrucci. The findings indicate that offensive word translation suffers a rank shift on offensive word ranks Departing from these findings. We propose euphemisation strategies with offensive word rank and character equivalence as the primary narrative basis with mediality and subtitling standard as the primary mechanical basis. Those strategies are downgrading, degrading, sidegrading, outgrading, ingrading, and retrograding. The reasons of euphemisation strategy implementation are bipolarly divided into aesthetics and mechanics in relation to distances and perspectives of the applied offensive words.