  The censorship of toxic comments is often left to the judgment of imperfect
models. Perspective API, a creation of Google technology incubator Jigsaw, is
perhaps the most widely used toxicity classifier in industry; the model is
employed by several online communities including The New York Times to identify
and filter out toxic comments with the goal of preserving online safety.
Unfortunately, Google's model tends to unfairly assign higher toxicity scores
to comments containing words referring to the identities of commonly targeted
groups (e.g., "woman,'' "gay,'' etc.) because these identities are frequently
referenced in a disrespectful manner in the training data. As a result,
comments generated by marginalized groups referencing their identities are
often mistakenly censored. It is important to be cognizant of this unintended
bias and strive to mitigate its effects. To address this issue, we have
constructed several toxicity classifiers with the intention of reducing
unintended bias while maintaining strong classification performance.
