Searching for PETs: Using Distributional and Sentiment-Based Methods to Find Potentially Euphemistic Terms
Patrick P. C. Lee, Martha Gavidia, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng · 2022
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.