  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.
