5 ms·
FWIW, general profanity detection is a highly nontrivial problem. It’s true that such subword profanity filters aren’t that great, but slightly more sophisticat
by drzoltar 6y ago
FWIW, general profanity detection is a highly nontrivial problem. It’s true that such subword profanity filters aren’t that great, but slightly more sophisticated ones (eg whole word matching or n-grams) tend to have relatively good precision. You could train a fancy neural network, but the overall return on precision and recall tends to be not that great (compared to the exponential change in speed and cost). The problem almost always crops up in out-of-distribution sentences (such as “bone” at a paleontology conference).
- wiml 6y agoEven humans with full general intelligence and domain knowledge will fail at profanity detection. I think the problem here is not so much that there are false triggers, but that there is no way to deal with the false triggers — no way to appeal to reason or utility.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoIt's a problem with a subjective answer. One man's profanity is not another man's profanity. Of course, the personality trait of desiring censoring “bad words” seems to highly correlate with a belief in objective morality. — the others are wrong about what they find profane!