Autoencoder-Based Feature Extraction for Identifying Hate Speech Spreaders in Social Media

Abstract

Hate speech on social media has become a big problem, making regular users very upset and giving victims depression and suicidal thoughts. Early identification of the user spreading this type of hate speech may be a better solution, allowing hate speech to be stopped at source. In this article, we attempt to identify these hate speech spreaders by finding a representation for each user. Each user’s comments are aggregated and fed to an auto-encoder to train it. The encoder part of the auto-encoder is used to get an encoded vector for each user. The encoded vector is used with different machine learning (ML) classifiers to determine if a user is spreading hate speech. The proposed model was tested using the dataset released by PAN 2021 (https://pan.webis.de/data.html) hate speech spreader profiling competition in English and Spanish. The experimental results show that support vector machine (SVM) with encoded vectors as features outperforms existing models with an accuracy of 92% for both English and Spanish dataset. The proposed features extraction technique is found to be equally effective at identifying fake news spreaders on fake news datasets provided by PAN 2020 yielding accuracy values of 95% and 83% for English and Spanish, respectively.