Learn text moderation concepts

Use Content Moderator's text moderation models to analyze text content, such as chat rooms, discussion boards, chatbots, e-commerce catalogs, and documents.

The service response includes the following information:

• Profanity: term-based matching with built-in list of profane terms in various languages
• Classification: machine-assisted classification into three categories
• Personal data
• Auto-corrected text
• Original text
• Language

Profanity

If the API detects any profane terms in any of the supported languages, those terms are included in the response. The response also contains their location (Index) in the original text. The ListId in the following sample JSON refers to terms found in custom term lists if available.

"Terms": [
    {
        "Index": 118,
        "OriginalIndex": 118,
        "ListId": 0,
        "Term": "<offensive word>"
    }

Classification

Content Moderator's machine-assisted text classification feature supports English only, and helps detect potentially undesired content. The flagged content may be assessed as inappropriate depending on context. It conveys the likelihood of each category. The feature uses a trained model to identify possible abusive, derogatory or discriminatory language. This includes slang, abbreviated words, offensive, and intentionally misspelled words.

The following extract in the JSON extract shows an example output:

"Classification": {
    "ReviewRecommended": true,
    "Category1": {
        "Score": 1.5113095059859916E-06
    },
    "Category2": {
        "Score": 0.12747249007225037
    },
    "Category3": {
        "Score": 0.98799997568130493
    }
}

Explanation

• Category1 refers to potential presence of language that may be considered sexually explicit or adult in certain situations.
• Category2 refers to potential presence of language that may be considered sexually suggestive or mature in certain situations.
• Category3 refers to potential presence of language that may be considered offensive in certain situations.
• Score is between 0 and 1. The higher the score, the higher the model is predicting that the category may be applicable. This feature relies on a statistical model rather than manually coded outcomes. We recommend testing with your own content to determine how each category aligns to your requirements.
• ReviewRecommended is either true or false depending on the internal score thresholds. Customers should assess whether to use this value or decide on custom thresholds based on their content policies.

Personal data

The personal data feature detects the potential presence of this information:

• Email address
• US mailing address
• IP address
• US phone number

The following example shows a sample response:

"pii":{
  "email":[
      {
        "detected":"abcdef@abcd.com",
        "sub_type":"Regular",
        "text":"abcdef@abcd.com",
        "index":32
      }
  ],
  "ssn":[

  ],
  "ipa":[
      {
        "sub_type":"IPV4",
        "text":"255.255.255.255",
        "index":72
      }
  ],
  "phone":[
      {
        "country_code":"US",
        "text":"6657789887",
        "index":56
      }
  ],
  "address":[
      {
        "text":"1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052",
        "index":89
      }
  ]
}

Auto-correction

The text moderation response can optionally return the text with basic auto-correction applied.

For example, the following input text has a misspelling.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazzy dog.

If you specify auto-correction, the response contains the corrected version of the text:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Creating and managing your custom lists of terms

While the default, global list of terms works great for most cases, you may want to screen against terms that are specific to your business needs. For example, you may want to filter out any competitive brand names from posts by users.

The following example shows the matching List ID:

"Terms": [
    {
        "Index": 118,
        "OriginalIndex": 118,
        "ListId": 231.
        "Term": "<offensive word>"
    }

The Content Moderator provides a Term List API with operations for managing custom term lists. Check out the Term Lists .NET quickstart if you are familiar with Visual Studio and C#.

Next steps

Test out the APIs with the Quickstart.