CRYPTEXT: Database and Interactive Toolkit of Human-Written Text Perturbations in the Wild
This addresses the problem of noisy and intentionally perturbed text in online discussions for researchers and practitioners in natural language processing, though it is incremental as it builds on existing data collection and tool development.
The researchers tackled the lack of a framework for analyzing human-written text perturbations in online content by introducing CRYPTEXT, an interactive system that provides a database and tools for extracting, perturbing, and normalizing such texts, with a demo video available.
User-generated textual contents on the Internet are often noisy, erroneous, and not in correct forms in grammar. In fact, some online users choose to express their opinions online through carefully perturbed texts, especially in controversial topics (e.g., politics, vaccine mandate) or abusive contexts (e.g., cyberbullying, hate-speech). However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no framework that explores these online ``human-written" perturbations (as opposed to algorithm-generated perturbations). Therefore, we introduce an interactive system called CRYPTEXT. CRYPTEXT is a data-intensive application that provides the users with a database and several tools to extract and interact with human-written perturbations. Specifically, CRYPTEXT helps look up, perturb, and normalize (i.e., de-perturb) texts. CRYPTEXT also provides an interactive interface to monitor and analyze text perturbations online. A short demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/8WT3G8xjIoI