Euphemism Detection by Transformers and Relational Graph Attention Network

Abstract

Euphemism is a type of figurative language broadly adopted in social media and daily conversations. People use euphemisms for politeness or to conceal what they are discussing. Euphemism detection is a challenging task because of its obscure and figurative nature. Even humans may not agree on if a word expresses euphemism. In this paper, we propose to employ bidirectional encoder representations transformers (BERT), and relational graph attention network in order to model the semantic and syntactic relations between the target words and the input sentence. The best performing method of ours reaches a macro F1 score of 84.0 on the euphemism detection dataset of the third workshop on figurative language processing shared task 2022.