It is common for people to be condescending without realizing it (Wong et al., 2014), but a lack of intent only partly mitigates the damage it can cause.
condescension detection is a potentially high-impact NLP task that could open the door to many applications and future research directions, including, for example, supporting productive interventions in online communities (Spertus, 1997), educating people who use condescending language in writing, helping linguists to understand the implicit linguistic acts associated with condescension, and helping social scientists to study the relationship between condescension and other variables like gender or socioeconomic status.