The paper describes an upgraded version of the Thesaurus of Modern Slovene 1.0, which is currently the largest open-access collection of Slovene synonyms generated automatically. The creation of the thesaurus has introduced a new type of dictionary, referred to as a responsive dictionary, which allows the data to respond continuously to the opinions of the contributing language community. The upgrade was motivated by the results of a survey of the user community’s attitudes towards the Thesaurus of Modern Slovene, which revealed a lack of dictionary labels, particularly for non-neutral vocabulary. As a result, the updated version of the thesaurus focuses on developing solutions for identifying and annotating extremely offensive and vulgar vocabulary. To address this, the digital medium is utilized to display information about potentially problematic vocabulary in new ways. The updated version of the thesaurus incorporates a combination of warning icons and longer explanations to provide a clear visual tag as well as an explanation about the potential consequences of word use. The identification of potentially negative words was primarily conducted manually. Synonym sets were exported from the dictionary database, ordered in semantic clusters, and reviewed by students who were provided with brief instructions to identify potentially negative words, such as elements of hate speech (discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or disability), negative attitudes (related to social status, wealth, behaviour and character, appearance, etc.), and vulgarity (related to taboo topics, e.g., sexuality, bodily excretions, and violence, in the typical informal speech situation). The decisions made by the students were reviewed and modified by a team of linguists, based on corpus data. As responsiveness is a key concept of the thesaurus, involving the user community in future labelling procedures is an important part of the preparation of final labelling solutions.
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