When Does Span-Guided Detoxification Help? Human Preferences and Evaluator Diagnostics in a Controlled Comparison

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.26795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Span-guided rewriting aims to preserve meaning by localizing edits to annotated harmful spans, but the same constraint can leave harmful intent insufficiently mitigated. We present a controlled exploratory comparison of span-guided and unguided detoxification on a mixed-source English evaluation set comprising manually curated inputs and HateXplain test items. We conduct a dense blinded human evaluation under a fixed single-generator setting. Human preferences reveal a trade-off rather than a uniformly superior rewriting strategy. Span-guided outputs are favored when localized editing preserves the original stance and avoids unnecessary modification, whereas unguided outputs are favored when broader rewriting achieves more complete mitigation