CATs are Fuzzy PETs: A Corpus and Analysis of Potentially Euphemistic Terms

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 2658–2671 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 2658 CATs are Fuzzy PETs: A Corpus and Analysis of Potentially Euphemistic Terms Martha Gavidia, Patrick Lee, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng Montclair State University Montclair, NJ, USA {gavidiam1, leep6, feldmana, pengj}@montclair.edu Abstract Euphemisms have not received much attention in natural language processing, despite being an important element of polite and figurative language. Euphemisms prove to be a difficult topic, not only because they are subject to language change, but also because humans may not agree on what is a euphemism and what is not. Nonetheless, the first step to tackling the issue is to collect and analyze examples of euphemisms. We present a corpus of potentially euphemistic terms (PETs) along with example texts from the GloWbE corpus. Additionally, we present a subcorpus of texts where these PETs are not being used euphemistically, which may be useful for future applications. We also discuss the results of multiple analyses run on the corpus. Firstly, we find that sentiment analysis on the euphemistic texts supports that PETs generally decrease negative and offensive sentiment. Secondly, we observe cases of disagreement in an annotation task, where humans are asked to label PETs as euphemistic or not in a subset of our corpus text examples. We attribute the disagreement to a variety of potential reasons, including if the PET was a commonly accepted term (CAT). Keywords: euphemisms, politeness, NLP 1. Introduction Euphemisms are mild or indirect expressions that are used in place of more unpleasant or offensive ones. They can be used in generally polite conversation (e.g., passed away in- stead of died), or even as a way to try and hide the truth (Rababah, 2014) by minimizing a threat and downplay- ing situations in order to create a favorable image (Karam, 2011); for example, saying armed conflict instead of war. For this paper, we consider a variety of euphemistic ex- pressions that provide alternatives to more direct meanings. These alternatives allow us to avoid potential awkwardness or offensiveness when discussing sensitive or taboo topics such as death, sexual activity, employment, bodily func- tions, politics, physical/mental attributes, etc. Because of their figurative nature, euphemisms can be ambiguous, ei- ther because of human subjectivity, or because euphemistic words and phrases may also be used literally (e.g., between jobs). As such, working with euphemisms in natural lan- guage processing is not straightforward. In this paper, we present an expanded list of common eu- phemisms which we will refer to as PETs, or Potentially Euphemistic Terms, as well as a corpus of euphemistic and literal usages of said PETs from web-based text data. To the best of our knowledge, there are no existing corpora of English sentences containing euphemisms. We hope the de- velopment of these new resources help build upon current NLP applications surrounding euphemisms, particularly in providing context differences to disambiguate these terms. The rest of the paper is as …

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