Killing me softly: Creative and cognitive aspects of implicitness in abusive language online

Abstract Abusive language is becoming a problematic issue for our society. The spread of messages that reinforce social and cultural intolerance could have dangerous effects in victims’ life. State-of-the-art technologies are often effective on detecting explicit forms of abuse, leaving unidentified the utterances with very weak offensive language but a strong hurtful effect. Scholars have advanced theoretical and qualitative observations on specific indirect forms of abusive language that make it hard to be recognized automatically. In this work, we propose a battery of statistical and computational analyses able to support these considerations, with a focus on creative and cognitive aspects of the implicitness, in texts coming from different sources such as social media and news. We experiment with transformers, multi-task learning technique, and a set of linguistic features to reveal the elements involved in the implicit and explicit manifestations of abuses, providing a solid basis for computational applications.