Title: Shielding Google's language toxicity model against adversarial attacks,
Abstract: Lack of moderation in online communities enables participants to incur in
personal aggression, harassment or cyberbullying, issues that have been
accentuated by extremist radicalisation in the contemporary post-truth politics
scenario. This kind of hostility is usually expressed by means of toxic
language, profanity or abusive statements. Recently Google has developed a
machine-learning-based toxicity model in an attempt to assess the hostility of
a comment; unfortunately, it has been suggested that said model can be deceived
by adversarial attacks that manipulate the text sequence of the comment. In
this paper we firstly characterise such adversarial attacks as using
obfuscation and polarity transformations. The former deceives by corrupting
toxic trigger content with typographic edits, whereas the latter deceives by
grammatical negation of the toxic content. Then, we propose a two--stage
approach to counter--attack these anomalies, bulding upon a recently proposed
text deobfuscation method and the toxicity scoring model. Lastly, we conducted
an experiment with approximately 24000 distorted comments, showing how in this
way it is feasible to restore toxicity of the adversarial variants, while
incurring roughly on a twofold increase in processing time. Even though novel
adversary challenges would keep coming up derived from the versatile nature of
written language, we anticipate that techniques combining machine learning and
text pattern recognition methods, each one targeting different layers of
linguistic features, would be needed to achieve robust detection of toxic
language, thus fostering aggression--free digital interaction.