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Perspective Score Types

If you are used to Perspective, the phrase scoreType may look more complicated than it needs to be.

At the moment, Respectify supports one score type on the Perspective-compatible endpoints:

  • PROBABILITY

What PROBABILITY Means​

A PROBABILITY score is a number from 0 to 1.

  • 0 means very little evidence of the requested attribute
  • 1 means very strong evidence of the requested attribute

For example:

  • a TOXICITY score of 0.05 means the comment shows very little toxicity
  • a TOXICITY score of 0.80 means the comment is much more likely to be toxic

This is not a promise that 0.80 means "80% certain" in some strict scientific sense. It is a scoring scale used for ranking and thresholds.

In practice, most integrations use these scores in one of three ways:

  • show the score to moderators
  • compare the score against a threshold such as 0.7
  • combine several scores into queues, warnings, or other moderation decisions

summaryScore and spanScores​

You will usually see PROBABILITY scores in one or both of these places:

  • summaryScore
  • spanScores

summaryScore is the score for the whole comment for that attribute. This is the one most systems use.

spanScores are optional scores for specific parts of the text. You only get them if you ask for span annotations. They are useful if you want to highlight which part of a comment contributed to a score.

Unsupported Score Types​

Other Perspective score types are not currently supported on Respectify's compatibility endpoints.

If you send a non-PROBABILITY score type, the request is rejected rather than guessed or silently converted. That is deliberate: it is better to fail clearly than to imply compatibility we do not actually provide. If you need another score type, please contact us.

Practical Advice​

  • If you are migrating a normal Perspective integration, summaryScore.value is usually the field you care about most.

  • If your product highlights text ranges, request spanAnnotations and use spanScores as well.

  • If you previously relied on a different score type, treat that as a migration issue to review explicitly rather than assuming it will behave the same way here. Contact us if you have a specific need: we're happy to help.

  • Perspective-Compatible Scoring

  • Perspective Score Corrections

  • Compatibility details