CRYPTEXT: Database and Interactive Toolkit of Human-Written Text Perturbations in the Wild

TL;DR

CRYPTEXT is an interactive toolkit and database designed to analyze, extract, and normalize human-written text perturbations found in online user-generated content, addressing a gap in understanding noisy and intentionally altered texts.

Contribution

It introduces CRYPTEXT, the first comprehensive system for exploring and interacting with human-written text perturbations in online environments.

Findings

Provides a database of human-written perturbations

Enables perturbation and normalization of texts

Offers tools for online analysis of text modifications

Abstract

User-generated textual contents on the Internet are often noisy, erroneous, and not in correct forms in grammar. In fact, some online users choose to express their opinions online through carefully perturbed texts, especially in controversial topics (e.g., politics, vaccine mandate) or abusive contexts (e.g., cyberbullying, hate-speech). However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no framework that explores these online ``human-written" perturbations (as opposed to algorithm-generated perturbations). Therefore, we introduce an interactive system called CRYPTEXT. CRYPTEXT is a data-intensive application that provides the users with a database and several tools to extract and interact with human-written perturbations. Specifically, CRYPTEXT helps look up, perturb, and normalize (i.e., de-perturb) texts. CRYPTEXT also provides an interactive interface to monitor and analyze text perturbations online. A short demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/8WT3G8xjIoI