Understanding Text Moderation Using Azure Content Safety
Text Moderation Overview
As the name implies, text moderation focuses on moderating the text generated by users, or AI.
For user-generated text, once a user submits text — such as a social media post — the moderation system analyzes the content for any harmful or inappropriate material that violates the platform’s guidelines. If improper or questionable content is found, the post is flagged or rejected by the system. Otherwise, if the post complies with the guidelines, it’s published.
When it comes to AI-generated content, the text moderation process follows a similar approach. The moderation system thoroughly examines the content, and if it’s deemed harmful or inappropriate, it will either be rejected, or a request is made for the AI to re-generate the content. This ensures the platform’s integrity. If the content is found to be acceptable, it’s shared with the user or published on the platform.
Importance of Text Moderation
Given that a vast amount of generated content on the internet is text-based, text moderation plays a crucial role in various online contexts and domains:
- Social Media Platforms: It ensures that user comments, posts, messages, etc., are safe and adhere to community guidelines.
- E-Commerce Platforms: It protects you from spam, offensive language, and misleading information. (You will no doubt have encountered a situation on e-commerce where you’ve either questioned product integrity, or if the vendor could be trusted. In this case, you’ll turn to product reviews and customer feedback.)
- Education Platforms: It safeguards students and educators from inappropriate content in online learning environments.
- Customer Support Chatbots: It filters out abusive language and ensures professional interactions between users and AI-powered support systems.
- Gaming Communities: It moderates in-game chats and user-generated content to create a positive gaming experience for all players.
In summary, effective text moderation is crucial in preventing cyber bullying, hate speech, explicit content, and other harmful communications that could negatively affect users and damage a platform’s reputation.
Understanding Text Moderation Services Offered by Azure Content Safety
Azure Content Safety offers advanced text classification and filtering capabilities to help developers and platforms implement robust text-based content moderation systems.
Key features of Azure Content Safety for text moderation are:
- Multi-category Classification: Content Safety recognizes four distinct categories of objectionable content - Hate speech, Sexual, Violence, and Self-harm. The classification model supports multi-labeling, meaning a single text sample can be flagged for multiple categories. For instance, a piece of content could be classified as inappropriate for both Sexual and Violence categories simultaneously.
- Customizable Thresholds: Every harm category the service recognizes also has a severity level rating (a 0-7 severity scale). This is meant to indicate the severity of the harm category with which the content is identified. Developers can set specific sensitivity level thresholds for each category to determine whether to block or allow the content.
- Block Custom Terms or Phrases: Usually, the default AI classifiers will be sufficient for most text moderation purposes. But if you still need to screen terms and phrases and block the content, you can add those specific terms and phrases to the blocklist.
- Multi-language Support: Azure Content Safety can analyze text in multiple languages, making it a good solution for global platforms.
Another great feature that Content Safety provides is the use of custom categories. If required, you can further control and fine-tune your content moderation system by training your own AI models to identify custom categories in new content.
You can learn more about the Content Safety provided categories and severity levels in detail here: Harm categories in Azure AI Content Safety. This page provides a comprehensive understanding of categories and will also enable you to easily decide what category threshold should you provide for your content moderation setup.