On the Impact of Word Representation in Hate Speech and Offensive Language Detection and Explanation

Abstract

Online hate speech and offensive language have been widely recognized as critical social problems. To defend against this problem, several recent works have emerged that focus on the detection and explanation of hate speech and offensive language using machine learning approaches. Although these approaches are quite effective in the detection and explanation of hate speech and offensive language samples, they do not explore the impact of the representation of such samples. In this work, we introduce a novel, pronunciation-based representation of hate speech and offensive language samples to enable its detection with high accuracy. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our pronunciation-based representation, we extend an existing hate-speech and offensive language defense model based on deep Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) neural networks by using our pronunciation-based representation of hate speech and offensive language samples to train this model. Our work finds that the pronunciation-based presentation significantly reduces noise in the datasets and enhances the overall performance of the existing model.