Illegal is not a Noun: Linguistic Form for Detection of Pejorative Nominalizations
Alexis Palmer, Melissa Robinson, Kristy K. Phillips · 2017
This paper focuses on a particular type of abusive language, targeting expressions in which typically neutral adjectives take on pejorative meaning when used as nouns -compare gay people to the gays.We first collect and analyze a corpus of hand-curated, expert-annotated pejorative nominalizations for four target adjectives: female, gay, illegal, and poor.We then collect a second corpus of automatically-extracted and POS-tagged, crowd-annotated tweets.For both corpora, we find support for the hypothesis that some adjectives, when nominalized, take on negative meaning.The targeted constructions are non-standard yet widelyused, and part-of-speech taggers mistag some nominal forms as adjectives.We implement a tool called NomCatcher to correct these mistaggings, and find that the same tool is effective for identifying new adjectives subject to transformation via nominalization into abusive language.