Russian Texts Detoxification with Levenshtein Editing

Abstract: Text detoxification is a style transfer task of creating neutral versions of toxic texts. In this paper, we use the concept of text editing to build a two-step tagging-based detoxification model using a parallel corpus of Russian texts. With this model, we achieved the best style transfer accuracy among all models in the RUSSE Detox shared task, surpassing larger sequence-to-sequence models.