Can GPT4 Detect Euphemisms across Multiple Languages?

AbstractA euphemism is a word or phrase used in place of another word or phrase that might be considered harsh, blunt, unpleasant, or offensive. Euphemisms generally soften the impact of what is being said, making it more palatable or appropriate for the context or audience. Euphemisms can vary significantly between languages, reflecting cultural sensitivities and taboos, and what might be a mild expression in one language could carry a stronger connotation or be completely misunderstood in another. This paper uses prompting techniques to evaluate OpenAI’s GPT4 for detecting euphemisms across multiple languages as part of the 2024 FigLang shared task. We evaluate both zero-shot and few-shot approaches. Our method achieved an average macro F1 of .732, ranking first in the competition. Moreover, we found that GPT4 does not perform uniformly across all languages, with a difference of .233 between the best (English .831) and the worst (Spanish .598) languages.