Empowering Digital Civility with an NLP Approach for Detecting Twitter Cyberbullying through Boosted Ensembles

Abstract

As the number of social networking sites grows, so do cyber dangers. Cyberbullying is harmful behaviour that uses technology to intimidate, harass or harm someone, often on social media platforms like Twitter. Machine learning is the optimal approach for cyberbullying detection on Twitter to process large amounts of data, identify patterns of offensive behaviour, and automate the detection process for corpus of tweets. To identify cyber threats using a trained model, the Boosted Ensemble (BE) technique is assessed with various machine learning algorithms such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Bidirectional LSTM (BILSTM), Recurrent Neural Network LSTM (RNN-LSTM), Multi-Modal Cyberbullying Detection (MMCD) and Random Forest (RF). These classifiers are trained on the vectorized data to classify the tweets to identify cyberbullying threats. The proposed framework can detect cyberbullying cases precisely on tweets. The significance of the work lies in detecting and mitigating cyber threats in real-time and it impacts in enhancing the safety and well-being of social media users by reducing instances of cyberbullying and other cyber threat. The comparative analysis is done using metrices like accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score and the comparison results shows that boosted ensemble technique outperforms other compared algorithms with its overall performance. The accuracy rate of CNN, LSTM, NB, DT, SVM, RF, BILSTM and BE (92.5%, 93.5%, 84.6%, 88%, 89.3%, 92%, 93.75% and 96%), precision rate of CNN, LSTM, NB, DT, SVM, RF, RNN-LSTM and BE (90.2%, 91.3%, 88%, 85%, 86%, 91.6%, 92.1% and 94%), recall rate of CNN, LSTM, NB, DT, SVM, RF, BILSTM and BE (89.8%, 90.7%, 90%, 82%, 88.67%, 89%, 91.04% and 93.7%) and F1 score of CNN, LSTM, NB, DT, SVM, RF, MMCD and BE (90.6%, 91.8%, 85%, 84.56% 87.2%, 90%, 84.6% and 94.89%).