Beyond Negative Stereotypes - Non-Negative Abusive Utterances about Identity Groups and Their Semantic Variants

We investigate a specific subtype of implicitly abusive language, focusing on non-negative sentences about identity groups (e.g. Women make good cooks ). We introduce a novel data-set comprising such utterances. It not only profiles abusive sentences but also includes various semantic variants of the same characteristic attributed to an identity group, allowing us to systematically examine the impact of different degrees of generalization and perspective framing. Thus we demonstrate that specific variants significantly intensify the perception of abusive-ness. By switching identity groups, we high-light how the characteristics often described in stereotypes are not inherently abusive. We also report on classification experiments.