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arXiv · 2205.10451

Searching for PETs: Using Distributional and Sentiment-Based Methods to Find Potentially Euphemistic Terms

Patrick Lee·Martha Gavidia·Anna Feldman·Jing Peng
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Abstract

This paper presents a linguistically driven proof of concept for finding potentially euphemistic terms, or PETs. Acknowledging that PETs tend to be commonly used expressions for a certain range of sensitive topics, we make use of distributional similarities to select and filter phrase candidates from a sentence and rank them using a set of simple sentiment-based metrics. We present the results of our approach tested on a corpus of sentences containing euphemisms, demonstrating its efficacy for detecting single and multi-word PETs from a broad range of topics. We also discuss future potential for sentiment-based methods on this task.

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Patrick Lee, Martha Gavidia, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng. 2022-05-20. Searching for PETs: Using Distributional and Sentiment-Based Methods to Find Potentially Euphemistic Terms. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10451

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