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State-of-the-art technologies are often effective on detecting explicit forms of abuse, leaving unidentified the utterances with very weak offensive language but a strong hurtful effect. Scholars have advanced theoretical and qualitative observations on specific indirect forms of abusive language that make it hard to be recognized automatically. In this work, we propose a battery of statistical and computational analyses able to support these considerations, with a focus on creative and cognitive aspects of the implicitness, in texts coming from different sources such as social media and news. We experiment with transformers, multi-task learning technique, and a set of linguistic features to reveal the elements involved in the implicit and explicit manifestations of abuses, providing a solid basis for computational applications.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1017\/s1351324922000316","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,8,3]],"date-time":"2022-08-03T10:04:30Z","timestamp":1659521070000},"page":"1516-1537","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/policypage","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":8,"title":["Killing me softly: Creative and cognitive aspects of implicitness in abusive language online"],"prefix":"10.1017","volume":"29","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6215-3374","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Simona","family":"Frenda","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5991-370X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Viviana","family":"Patti","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8922-1242","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Paolo","family":"Rosso","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"56","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,8,3]]},"reference":[{"key":"S1351324922000316_ref41","unstructured":"Kumar, R. , Ojha, A.K. , Malmasi, S. and Zampieri, M. 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