Deep Random Forest and AraBert for Hate Speech Detection from Arabic Tweets

Nowadays, hate speech detection from Arabic tweets attracts the attention of many researchers. Numerous systems and techniques have been proposed to address this classification challenge. Nonetheless, three major limits persist: the use of deep learning models with an excess of hyperparameters, the reliance on hand-crafted features, and the requirement for a huge amount of training data to achieve satisfactory performance. In this study, we propose Contextual Deep Random Forest (CDRF), a hate speech detection approach that combines contextual embedding and Deep Random Forest. From the experimental findings, the Arabic contextual embedding model proves to be highly effective in hate speech detection, outperforming the static embedding models. Additionally, we prove that the proposed CDRF significantly enhances the performance of Arabic hate speech classification

Profanity and hate speech detection

Profanity, often found in today’s online social media, has been used to detect online hate speech. The aims of this study were to investigate the profanity usage on Twitter by different groups of users, and to quantify the effectiveness of using profanity in detecting hate speech. Tweets from three English-speaking countries, Australia, Malaysia, and the United States, were collected for data analysis. Statistical hypothesis tests were performed to justify the difference of profanity usage among the three countries, and a probability estimation procedure was formulated based on Bayes theorem to quantify the effectiveness of profanity-based methods in hate speech detection. Three deep learning methods, long short-term memory (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM (BLSTM), and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) are further used to evaluate the effect of profanity screening on building classification model. Our experimental results show that the effectiveness of using profanity in detecting hate speech is questionable. Nevertheless, the results also show that for Australia tweets, where profanity is more associated with hatred, profanity-based methods in hate speech detection could be effective and profanity screening can address the class imbalance issue in hate speech detection. This is evidenced by the performances of using deep learning methods on the profanity screened data of Australia data, which achieved a classification f1-score greater than 0.84

Uncovering Political Hate Speech During Indian Election Campaign: A New Low-Resource Dataset and Baselines

The detection of hate speech in political discourse is a critical issue, and this becomes even more challenging in low-resource languages. To address this issue, we introduce a new dataset named IEHate, which contains 11,457 manually annotated Hindi tweets related to the Indian Assembly Election Campaign from November 1, 2021, to March 9, 2022. We performed a detailed analysis of the dataset, focusing on the prevalence of hate speech in political communication and the different forms of hateful language used. Additionally, we benchmark the dataset using a range of machine learning, deep learning, and transformer-based algorithms. Our experiments reveal that the performance of these models can be further improved, highlighting the need for more advanced techniques for hate speech detection in low-resource languages. In particular, the relatively higher score of human evaluation over algorithms emphasizes the importance of utilizing both human and automated approaches for effective hate speech moderation. Our IEHate dataset can serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working on developing and evaluating hate speech detection techniques in low-resource languages. Overall, our work underscores the importance of addressing the challenges of identifying and mitigating hate speech in political discourse, particularly in the context of low-resource languages. The dataset and resources for this work are made available at https://github.com/Farhan-jafri/Indian-Election.Comment: Accepted to ICWSM Workshop (MEDIATE

Do Linguistic Features Help Deep Learning? The Case of Aggressiveness in Mexican Tweets

[EN] In the last years, the control of online user generated content is becoming a priority, because of the increase of online aggressiveness and hate speech legal cases. Considering the complexity and the importance of this issue, this paper presents an approach that combines the deep learning framework with linguistic features for the recognition of aggressiveness in Mexican tweets. This approach has been evaluated relying on a collection of tweets released by the organizers of the shared task about aggressiveness detection in the context of the Ibereval 2018 evaluation campaign. The use of a benchmark corpus allows to compare the results with those obtained by Ibereval 2018 participant systems. However, looking at the achieved results, linguistic features seem not to help the deep learning classification for this task.The work of Simona Frenda and Paolo Rosso was partially funded by the Spanish MINECO under the research project SomEMBED (TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P).Frenda, S.; Banerjee, S.; Rosso, P.; Patti, V. (2020). Do Linguistic Features Help Deep Learning? The Case of Aggressiveness in Mexican Tweets. Computación y Sistemas. 24(2):633-643. https://doi.org/10.13053/CyS-24-2-3398S63364324