Revisiting Queer Minorities in Lexicons (2022)

Abstract: Lexicons play an important role in content moderation often being the first line of defense. However, little or no literature exists in analyzing the representation of queer-related words in them. In this paper, we consider twelve well-known lexicons containing inappropriate words and analyze how gender and sexual minorities are represented in these lexicons. Our analyses reveal that several of these lexicons barely make any distinction between pejorative and non-pejorative queer-related words. We express concern that such unfettered usage of non-pejorative queer-related words may impact queer presence in mainstream discourse. Our analyses further reveal that the lexicons have poor overlap in queer-related words. We finally present a quantifiable measure of consistency and show that several of these lexicons are not consistent in how they include (or omit) queer-related words.

## introduction on august 23, 2013, the online version of the oxford english dictionary updated the meaning of a word. updates to this dictionary are not uncommon. however, the updates typically include new words in the latest edition. for instance, bollywood, the notorious name for the mumbai film industry, made its way into the dictionary in 2004. or, for example, the ongoing pandemic forced a slew of vaccine-related wordsvaccine passport, vaccine hesitancy, and vaxxed -into the 2021 edition. every new edition introduces several such words reflecting the ever-changing world with intermixing cultures and acknowledging the fluid and expansive nature of english -one of the * ashiqur r. khudabukhsh is the corresponding author. most popular, pluricentric world languages @xcite . what was remarkable about the august 23, 2013, online update was that this word had its first known usage in the 14 th century, and its primary meaning remained unaltered since its inclusion in the very first edition of the oxford dictionary! marriage, previously defined as the formal union of a man and a woman, typically as recognized by law, by which they become husband and wife, received an inclusive definition in the dictionary following the legalization of gay marriage in the uk. the new definition dispensed with the gender restriction and defined marriage as a union between two persons. words and their meanings exist in a continuum @xcite , often shifted and shaped by evolving social norms, hard-fought legal acceptances, and new world events. lexicons proposed to aid content moderation, in turn, exhibit a rather static nature and a much narrower scope, representing a collection of words deemed as potentially hateful/harmful/abusive/toxic/offensive by a group of annotators (possibly exhibiting limited diversity and/or with under-specified expertise) at a given point of time. in this paper, we focus on twelve such lexicons aimed at aiding content moderation. a varied collection of words have been used to describe them, including being termed as abusive, offensive, profane, toxic, and hate speech lexicons. we use an umbrella term inappropriate to refer to any of these descriptions. in this paper, we focus on twelve inappropriate lexicons and analyze the presence (and absence) of words related to gender and sexual minorities (we call these words queerrelated words) in them foot_0 . our paper seeks to attract the attention of the broader community of psycho-linguistic experts and ethicists on the following issues. first, our study reveals that these lexicons have limited overlap, and many of these under-specify how they were obtained. while data sets have received considerable attention for audits @xcite , inappropriate lexicons have received little or no attention for quality control. given that such lexicons often serve as the first line of defense against inappropriate content, certain omissions and inclusions can significantly influence what gets flagged as inappropriate and may impact minorities to get their voices heard. as we seek to move towards more transparent, responsible, and ethical ai systems, we need to build stronger guardrails for methods and resources that are used for content moderation/filtering. we see our work as a voice in the scientific conversation focusing on the treatment of the queer community in language technologies @xcite @xcite . among these recent prominent studies, @xcite discuss the potential erasure of non-binary identities due to stereotypical harms propagated by language models; @xcite reveal that large language models exhibit discriminative behavior by producing harmful text completions for subjects from the queer community; and @xcite demonstrate how blocklist-based filters have been shown to remove content related to the queer community, particularly when it contains terms related to sexual orientation. our work focusing on queer-related terms in inappropriate lexicons complements these aforementioned important studies. second, our study raises a question that we believe is timely and important. we observe that several non-pejorative words representing gender and sexual minorities (e.g., gay, queer, lesbian, trans) are present in these inappropriate lexicons. however, these lexicons often do not make any clear distinction between the targets for harm and targeted harms. we worry that unfettered use of gay, lesbian or trans along with their pejorative versions (e.g., faggot foot_1 ) within the same lexicon may hinder the inclusion of sexual minorities into mainstream discourse. thus we seek guidance from true experts on this issue that may significantly influence how a safe web may look like for sexual minorities in the future. third, continuing the same thread of discussion surrounding the inclusion or omission of nonpejorative versions representing gender and sexual minorities, we present a first step towards quantifying inconsistencies in lexicons with respect to queer-related words. our study reveals that these lexicons exhibit inconsistencies that can potentially influence content moderation outcomes if these lexicons are used as an aid. ## analysis we now present an analysis of these lexicons considering the following aspects. coverage: we first note that the overlap between l q and the twelve inappropriate lexicons is minimal, with the cmu lexicon achieving the highest overlap (23.48%), indicating that a vast majority of the queer lexicon is not incorporated into any of the well-known lexicons. when we combine all lexicons, the resulting lexicon has a slightly higher overlap of 40.87%. as shown in figure 1 , within the lexicons, limited overlap of these queer-related terms exists. these findings point to the following observations. first, lexicons can benefit from further inclusive efforts in identifying pejorative (if the sole intended purpose is to detect harm) and non-pejorative (if the purpose also involves detecting targets of harm) queer-related terms. second, given that there is poor overlap within lexicons with figure 3 : most frequently occurring queer-related words juxtaposed with similarly frequently occurring slurs from the lexicons. presence of pejorative and non-pejorative terms: we note that ten lexicons have more pejorative queer-related words than non-pejorative queerrelated words (in terms of absolute value). we argue that putting the pejorative and non-pejorative terms together in the same lexicon potentially con-name consistency % @xcite 66.67 @xcite 100.0 @xcite 66.67 @xcite flates between targets of harm and words to inflict harm. as shown in figure 2 , among the most-frequent queer-related words in the lexicon, gay and queer are present. to emphasize our point further, figure 3 juxtaposes a few words from l q np along with other similarly frequent words across the lexicons. we note that words like motherfuckers or whores have appeared less frequently than queer or gay! we believe that unless these lexicons present concrete examples distinguishing between pejorative and non-pejorative usage of gay as presented in pamungkas et al. (2022), unfettered use of non-pejorative queerrelated terms can seriously limit queer presence in mainstream discourse. consistency: if a lexicon contains both dyke and faggot in it yet omits tranny, content moder-ation outcomes (that considers this lexicon) could affect the transgender minority. similarly, notwithstanding our earlier point that speculates if nonpejorative queer specific words should be at all present in an inappropriate lexicon, presence of gay in the lexicon but absence of lesbian could potentially trigger differential content moderation treatment for the two communities. in what follows, we develop simple constraints and quantify how consistent published lexicons are. we acknowledge that our choice of lexicon subsets and defined constraints are somewhat over-simplified and a far more nuanced treatment is possible, our primary goal in this experiment is to attract the research community's attention about addressing these potential inconsistencies that can pave the way towards better practices in future lexicons. let l np and l p denote two disjoint lexicon subsets where l np contains non-pejorative queerrelated words and l p contains pejorative queerrelated words; i.e., l np ∩ l @xmath0. further, let a bijective mapping f from l np to l p exist, i.e., for each element in l np , a corresponding unique element in l p exists and vice versa. let the function, f , returns the corresponding pejorative word. we define l @xmath1, lesbian, trans} and l @xmath2, dyke, tranny}. next, we define the following constraints with respect to a lexicon l: the consistency of these lexicons based on these constraints are depicted in ## conclusions and discussions in this paper, we analyze the presence of queerrelated words in several well-known inappropriate english language lexicons. our analysis identifies possible avenues to provide stronger guardrails against potential harm through (1) expanding lexicons with additional terms; (2) setting more transparent annotation guidelines; (3) distinguishing between pejorative and non-pejorative queer related terms; and (4) improving lexicon consistency concerning queer-related terms. we believe our most important contribution is raising the question of whether non-pejorative queer-related terms should appear in inappropriate lexicons to begin with. with the current disturbing situation in us politics, where six states are considering passing what the proponents of minority rights dub as the don't say gay bill foot_4 , we strongly feel that including non-pejorative queerrelated words merits serious discussion. we believe our paper will motivate a scientific dialogue by setting better guidelines to encourage queer presence in mainstream discourse. our work raises several important points to ponder. grounding other research efforts: apart from aiding content moderation, inappropriate lexicons can lend grounding to other research efforts. for example, a recent paper @xcite has consulted the cmu lexicon and another lexicon listing taboo-words for kids @xcite to construct a set of inappropriate words for kids. @xcite take a rather passive stance in their treatment of queer-related words. @xcite state that the authors extensively debated whether non-pejorative queer-related words such as gay or queer should be in the lexicon, but since these words were already present in both lexicons, they retain them, seeking more inputs from developmental psychologists. unless the research community takes a more definitive stance on when and how non-pejorative queer-related words should be included in these inappropriate language lexicons, we may see more research efforts sidestepping this important issue. cultural effect: our study is limited to english lexicons. we notice the non-uniform presence of queer-related words across lexicons even within that. different countries and cultures have varying degrees of legal, social, and cultural acceptance of the queer community. we believe our study will open the gates for a multi-lingual, multi-cultural analysis of queer presence in inappropriate lexicons. in-the-wild impact assessment: we hypothesize that lexicon variations can influence content outcome when deployed in the wild to decide the moderation fate of web users. while some anecdotal evidence already exists 7 , an extensive in-the-wild impact assessment of how different lexicons can affect content moderation outcomes can further strengthen our findings. a list to criticize other lists: regardless of how well-meaning our intentions are, the 115 queerrelated terms chosen by our annotators affect our analyses. nonetheless, we point out that several of our findings are unaffected (or minimally affected) by l q . for example, the annotation details (or lack thereof) of the inappropriate lexicons have nothing to do with l q . second, our consistency analysis focuses on a handful of pejorative and non-pejorative queer-related words that are well-recognized by the community. finally, using well-recognized non-pejorative words such as gay and queer to substantiate our argument, we show that certain non-pejorative queer-related words are more frequently listed than unambiguously inappropriate non-queer-related words.