Your spouse needs professional help: Determining the Contextual
  Appropriateness of Messages through Modeling Social Relationships
David Jurgens Agrima Seth Jackson Sargent Athena Aghighi Michael Geraci
Understanding interpersonal communication requires, in part, understanding
the social context and norms in which a message is said. However, current
methods for identifying offensive content in such communication largely operate
independent of context, with only a few approaches considering community norms
or prior conversation as context. Here, we introduce a new approach to
identifying inappropriate communication by explicitly modeling the social
relationship between the individuals. We introduce a new dataset of
contextually-situated judgments of appropriateness and show that large language
models can readily incorporate relationship information to accurately identify
appropriateness in a given context. Using data from online conversations and
movie dialogues, we provide insight into how the relationships themselves
function as implicit norms and quantify the degree to which context-sensitivity
is needed in different conversation settings. Further, we also demonstrate that
contextual-appropriateness judgments are predictive of other social factors
expressed in language such as condescension and politeness.