Investigating the Effect of Machine-Translation on Automated Classification of Toxic Comments

This paper discusses the research findings on the performance of automated toxic comment classification following machine translation. We tested Google Perspective API first on comments from non-English Wikipedia talk pages in five languages, and then on their English translation (generated with Google's Cloud Translate API). In addition to giving baselines on the current performance of Perspective in five languages, this allows for comparison on how machine-translation alters the classification. We show that the level of disagreement between pre- and post-translation classification is heavily dependent on the language used. The comments come from a Kaggle dataset and we filter them to ensure monolingual comments with simple punctuation. Results show above 84% of the French, Italian and Spanish comments received the same class pre- and post-translation, while Portuguese and Russian performed the worst of the five languages tested, with F-scores below 0.6.