The Proposals (S2S) sensitive language detector scans proposal applications for keywords and phrases that may be considered sensitive by your institution. This is a configurable feature that must be activated by a 424 System Admin before use.

Activating the Sensitive Language Detector

By default, this capability is turned off. To enable the sensitive language detector:

1. Navigate to the More tab > Institutional Preferences.

2. Find the setting labeled Check proposals and attachments for the existence of sensitive language and set it to Yes.

3. After setting this to Yes, a new section titled Active for will appear. The selections displayed determine which roles will have access to the sensitive language detector.

The four checkboxes correspond to the four different role levels available in Proposals (S2S) . Adding a checkbox next to a role means that any user with that role will see warnings related to sensitive language detections.

Configuring the Sensitive Language Detector

After activating the sensitive language detector, 424 System Admin must decide which keywords and phrases qualify as sensitive language. This is done using the built-in configuration tool on the Institutional Preferences page.

1. Open the configuration tool by clicking the Configure Sensitive Language button.

2. A pop-up window will appear.

3. Type or paste desired sensitive phrases into the Add new phrases text box. When adding multiple phrases, make sure the delimiter you use matches the character defined in the Delimiter field. For example, if you enter “climate, culture, art,” the delimiter should be a comma ( , ) to match the field setting.

4. Once the added phrases are ready, click the Parse Phrases button. This will analyze the added phrases and split them up according to the chosen delimiter, then place the final results in the Pending Changes area on the right side of the screen.

5. Once the added phrases in the staging area are satisfactory, click Save Changes.

Removing Phrases

Remove an existing phrase from the list by clicking the red X button to the right of the phrase in the list. Phrases can be added or removed at any time.

If the removal was a mistake, the deletion can be retracted by clicking the green undo button to the right of the staged deletion. This will return the phrase to the main list. Otherwise, click Save Changes to apply the deletion.

Populating Default Phrases

For convenience, Proposals (S2S) offers the ability to pre-populate the sensitive language list with a set of default phrases. These phrases were last updated in June 2025 and represent Cayuse’s comprehensive list of potentially sensitive keywords and acronyms. To use this feature, click the Fetch Default Phrases button in the configuration window.

Please note: Fetching the default phrases will overwrite any existing sensitive phrases that have been manually configured.

Using the Sensitive Language Detector

Once it’s activated and configured, the sensitive language detector will be active for every proposal in the system. To scan a proposal for sensitive language, start by simply opening it.

There are two locations where scanning takes place:

1. On attachment uploads
2. On final validation

Scanning on Attachment Upload

Each time an attachment is uploaded, that attachment is scanned for the phrases in the sensitive language list. Any resulting detections are displayed to the user in the attachment window dialogue before completing the upload.

The detection message displayed will indicate the page number(s) of the detection(s), along with the specific phrase(s) detected.

Sensitive language warnings are optional to resolve and may be ignored—for example, if they result from false detections or non-critical phrases. Ignoring a warning will not block the attachment upload.

Scanning on Final Validation

Sensitive language scanning also takes place during proposal validation.

To utilize this functionality, navigate to a proposal’s Electronic Submission page and click the Validate Proposal button.

If the logged-in user has a role that has been given access to the sensitive language detection messages (see the configuration section of this article for more information), then the resulting pop-up validation window will include all sensitive phrases detected in the proposal. The detection messages include the form in which the detection was found, as well as the element and actual detected phrase.

These detections are warnings only—they will never prevent submission and do not guarantee that a sponsor will find the flagged language problematic. The tool is designed simply to give grant makers added insight into their proposal content.

Understanding Matching Logic

How does the sensitive language detector identify phrases in a proposal?

The detector uses two matching methods:

1. General phrase matching
    
   • Applied to all non-acronym phrases.
   • Flexible: ignores punctuation, spaces, capitalization, and special characters.
   • Example: If “diversity” is defined as a sensitive phrase, the sentence “Biodiversity studies will be an important focus in this research” would trigger a match, since the letters d-i-v-e-r-s-i-t-y appear within “Biodiversity.”
2. Acronym matching
    
   • Similar to general matching, but case-sensitive.
   • Example: If “ING” is defined as a sensitive acronym, the word “running” would not trigger a match, because the case does not align.