Your spouse needs professional help: Determining the Contextual Appropriateness of Messages through Modeling Social Relationships

Abstract: 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 LLMs 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.