Language Model Detoxification in Dialogue with Contextualized Stance Control

To reduce the toxic degeneration in a pretrained Language Model (LM), previous work on Language Model detoxification has focused on reducing the toxicity of the generation itself (self-toxicity) without consideration of the context (Dathathri et al., 2020;Krause et al., 2020;Qian et al., 2022). As a result, a type of implicit offensive language where the generations support the offensive language in the context (Figure 1) is ignored. Different from the LM controlling tasks in previous work, where the desired attributes are fixed for generation, the desired stance of the generation depends on the offensiveness of the context. Therefore, we propose a novel control method to do contextdependent detoxification with the stance taken into consideration. We introduce meta prefixes to learn the contextualized stance control strategy and to generate the stance control prefix according to the input context. The generated stance prefix is then combined with the toxicity control prefix to guide the response generation. Experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively learn the contextdependent stance control strategies while keeping a low self-toxicity of the underlying LM.