Google Patent on How They Classify Offensive Content Based on Their Usage

Bill Slawski breaks down a newly granted Google patent that sheds some light on how Google will classify words as offensive based on how it’s used. It talks about how offensive content might be identified and software used to redact (or obfuscate) potentially offensive words before such content is served to end users.

Key points:

• There is no mention that a page that contains offensive content might be considered lower quality content than other pages on the Web, but there is the option that kind of content could be obfuscated in Google’s Index.
• The techniques behind the patent are to train a classifier to tell when a term that potentially may be offensive is being used in an offensive or a non-offensive way.
• In addition to looking at the content of text samples or contextual information about the textual samples, Google may use machine learning techniques to identify offensive content.