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Main Authors: Guo, Haotan, He, Jianfei, Ma, Jiayuan, Na, Hongbin, Wang, Zimu, Zhang, Haiyang, Chen, Qi, Wang, Wei, Shi, Zijing, Shen, Tao, Chen, Ling
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07640
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author Guo, Haotan
He, Jianfei
Ma, Jiayuan
Na, Hongbin
Wang, Zimu
Zhang, Haiyang
Chen, Qi
Wang, Wei
Shi, Zijing
Shen, Tao
Chen, Ling
author_facet Guo, Haotan
He, Jianfei
Ma, Jiayuan
Na, Hongbin
Wang, Zimu
Zhang, Haiyang
Chen, Qi
Wang, Wei
Shi, Zijing
Shen, Tao
Chen, Ling
contents Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (PCR), defined as the deliberate use of homophonic or near-homophonic variants to hide toxic intent, has become a major obstacle to Chinese content moderation. While this problem is well-recognized, existing evaluations predominantly rely on rule-based, synthetic perturbations that ignore the creativity of real users. We organize PCR into a four-way surface-form taxonomy and compile \ours, a dataset of 500 naturally occurring, phonetically cloaked offensive posts gathered from the RedNote platform. Benchmarking state-of-the-art LLMs on this dataset exposes a serious weakness: the best model reaches only an F1-score of 0.672, and zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting pushes performance even lower. Guided by error analysis, we revisit a Pinyin-based prompting strategy that earlier studies judged ineffective and show that it recovers much of the lost accuracy. This study offers the first comprehensive taxonomy of Chinese PCR, a realistic benchmark that reveals current detectors' limits, and a lightweight mitigation technique that advances research on robust toxicity detection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_07640
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lost in Pronunciation: Detecting Chinese Offensive Language Disguised by Phonetic Cloaking Replacement
Guo, Haotan
He, Jianfei
Ma, Jiayuan
Na, Hongbin
Wang, Zimu
Zhang, Haiyang
Chen, Qi
Wang, Wei
Shi, Zijing
Shen, Tao
Chen, Ling
Computation and Language
Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (PCR), defined as the deliberate use of homophonic or near-homophonic variants to hide toxic intent, has become a major obstacle to Chinese content moderation. While this problem is well-recognized, existing evaluations predominantly rely on rule-based, synthetic perturbations that ignore the creativity of real users. We organize PCR into a four-way surface-form taxonomy and compile \ours, a dataset of 500 naturally occurring, phonetically cloaked offensive posts gathered from the RedNote platform. Benchmarking state-of-the-art LLMs on this dataset exposes a serious weakness: the best model reaches only an F1-score of 0.672, and zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting pushes performance even lower. Guided by error analysis, we revisit a Pinyin-based prompting strategy that earlier studies judged ineffective and show that it recovers much of the lost accuracy. This study offers the first comprehensive taxonomy of Chinese PCR, a realistic benchmark that reveals current detectors' limits, and a lightweight mitigation technique that advances research on robust toxicity detection.
title Lost in Pronunciation: Detecting Chinese Offensive Language Disguised by Phonetic Cloaking Replacement
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07640