English

Mimicking How Humans Interpret Out-of-Context Sentences Through Controlled Toxicity Decoding

Computation and Language 2026-04-17 v1

Abstract

Interpretations of a single sentence can vary, particularly when its context is lost. This paper aims to simulate how readers perceive content with varying toxicity levels by generating diverse interpretations of out-of-context sentences. By modeling toxicity, we can anticipate misunderstandings and reveal hidden toxic meanings. Our proposed decoding strategy explicitly controls toxicity in the set of generated interpretations by (i) aligning interpretation toxicity with the input, (ii) relaxing toxicity constraints for more toxic input sentences, and (iii) promoting diversity in toxicity levels within the set of generated interpretations. Experimental results show that our method improves alignment with human-written interpretations in both syntax and semantics while reducing model prediction uncertainty.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.08159,
  title  = {Mimicking How Humans Interpret Out-of-Context Sentences Through Controlled Toxicity Decoding},
  author = {Maria Mihaela Trusca and Liesbeth Allein},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.08159},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Short paper; accepted at TrustNLP @ NAACL 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:15:25.064Z