Speech Toxicity Analysis: A New Spoken Language Processing Task

Toxic speech, also known as hate speech, is regarded as one of the crucial issues plaguing online social media today. Most recent work on toxic speech detection is constrained to the modality of text with no existing work on toxicity detection from spoken utterances. In this paper, we propose a new Spoken Language Processing task of detecting toxicity from spoken speech. We introduce DeToxy, the first publicly available toxicity annotated dataset for English speech, sourced from various openly available speech databases, consisting of over 2 million utterances. Finally, we also provide analysis on how a spoken speech corpus annotated for toxicity can help facilitate the development of E2E models which better capture various prosodic cues in speech, thereby boosting toxicity classification on spoken utterances.