README.md

---
license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
- text-classification
language:
- multilingual
tags:
- toxicity
- hate-speech
- perspective-api
- content-moderation
- measurement-infrastructure
pretty_name: ByeByePerspectiveAPI Snapshot
size_categories:
- 1M<n<10M
---

# ByeByePerspectiveAPI -- Rescoring Snapshot

Companion data release for **"Bye Bye Perspective API: Lessons for Measurement Infrastructure in NLP, CSS and LLM Evaluation"** (EMNLP 2026 Findings).

Perspective API's discontinuation at the end of 2026 leaves behind non-updatable benchmarks and irreproducible results across a large body of NLP, computational social science, and LLM-evaluation research. This repository is a snapshot archive: **77 publicly available toxicity/hate-speech datasets and major benchmarks, rescored with Perspective API before shutdown**, released as a frozen, versioned, fully-documented reference point for reproducibility going forward.

## What's here

- **`datasets/<key>/`** -- one folder per dataset. Each contains `<key>.parquet` (the scored data) and its own `README.md` (source, license pointer, merge-back instructions, and any dataset-specific caveats).
- **`datasets_overview.csv`** -- one row per dataset: corresponding paper, dominant language(s), usage category, and row count. See the paper's Appendix for the full table.
- **`literature_review/`** -- the bibliographic review this release is grounded in: which papers use Perspective API, how they were found, and how they were categorized. See `literature_review/README.md`.

## Data schema (every dataset parquet)

| column | meaning |
|---|---|
| `dataset_id` | this dataset's key |
| `input_id` | the original dataset's own row id (or split-local index if none existed) -- use this to merge back onto the original release |
| `toxicity`, `severe_toxicity`, `identity_attack`, `insult`, `profanity`, `threat` | Perspective production-attribute scores (0-1), or null if not requested/failed |
| `lang` | source-declared language code (per-row where available) |
| `detected_languages` | language(s) Perspective itself detected for the request |
| `ok` | whether the API call succeeded |
| `error` | failure reason where `ok` is false |
| `query_ts` | when this row was scored -- Perspective exposes no public model-version string, so this is the closest available version pin |

**No text is included.** This release ships only identifiers, Perspective scores, and query metadata -- never the underlying text -- so redistribution stays within each original dataset's own license/terms. Perspective *scores* in this repository are released under CC-BY 4.0; the identifiers let you re-attach the original text yourself.

### Merging scores back onto the original text

Every dataset's own `README.md` (under `datasets/<key>/`) gives its exact source and a runnable code snippet, but the pattern is the same everywhere:

1. Re-download the original dataset from the source named in that dataset's README (Hugging Face, GitHub, OSF, Zenodo, or figshare).
2. Build an `input_id` column on the original data -- its own id column if it had one, otherwise its 0-based row index within the split.
3. Join on `input_id`:

```python
import pandas as pd

scores = pd.read_parquet("datasets/<key>/<key>.parquet")
original = ...  # load however that dataset is normally loaded
original["input_id"] = original["input_id"].astype(str)  # see that dataset's README for the exact id column
scores["input_id"] = scores["input_id"].astype(str)
merged = original.merge(scores, on="input_id", how="left")
```

Exact-duplicate texts within a dataset were collapsed before scoring, so a duplicate row in the original data won't have its own `input_id` -- look its score up by exact text match against a row that does have one.

## Methodology summary

- **Endpoint**: `https://commentanalyzer.googleapis.com/v1alpha1/comments:analyze`, six production attributes (toxicity, severe toxicity, identity attack, insult, profanity, threat), `doNotStore: true` on every request.
- **Language hints**: sent only for Perspective's documented production-supported languages; otherwise the request relied on Perspective's own auto-detection.
- **Query window**: 2026-05-22 through 2026-08-29.
- **Dataset discovery**: (i) known, curated Hugging Face hate-speech/toxicity releases; (ii) a scan of every GitHub/OSF/Zenodo/figshare repository already retrieved as a code artifact of a paper in the literature review corpus, using both filename- and content-based text-column detection; (iii) a targeted search, per included paper without an identified code artifact, for its corresponding public release. Every dataset was manually checked against its cited source paper before inclusion; unverifiable matches were excluded rather than guessed.
- **Coverage**: 6,162,826 total rows, 5,897,618 (95.7%) scored successfully. Failures concentrate in languages Perspective does not support at all (e.g. Turkish, Finnish) -- reported explicitly per dataset rather than hidden.

See the paper's appendix and `literature_review/README.md` for full detail.

## Citation

If you use this snapshot, please cite the paper:

```bibtex
@inproceedings{byebyeperspectiveapi2026,
  title     = {Bye Bye Perspective API: Lessons for Measurement Infrastructure in NLP, CSS and LLM Evaluation},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026},
  year      = {2026}
}
```