New Terms, New Toxicity: Consensus-based Chinese Neologism Toxicity Detection via Search-Augmented LLMs

Abstract

Neologisms, emerging terms in meaning or form, can serve as new vehicles for toxic expression, like "country girl" as a stigmatizing label targeting feminism. Such toxic neologisms appear benign but have evolved into toxic usage in public consensus, posing challenges to moderation systems and remaining underexplored. In this paper, we investigate how to detect implicit toxicity expressed via neologisms. We first propose a taxonomy that captures the origins and consensus-verification criteria of toxic neologisms, followed by the construction of a lexicon spanning widely observed risk categories. To capture toxicity grounded in public consensus, we introduce SeTox, a search-augmented framework that enables static large language models (LLMs) to incorporate real-time web context for neologism toxicity detection. Experiments show that SeTox, even with 3B-scale models, outperforms recent large-scale models, demonstrating its scalability to incorporate real-world knowledge for toxic neologism detection. Disclaimer: this paper has offensive contents that may be disturbing to some readers.