Passion-Net: a robust precise and explainable predictor for hate speech detection in Roman Urdu text

Abstract

With an aim to eliminate or reduce the spread of hate content across social media platforms, the development of artificial intelligence supported computational predictors is an active area of research. However, diversity of languages hinders development of generic predictors that can precisely identify hate content. Several language-specific hate speech detection predictors have been developed for most common languages including English, Chinese and German. Specifically, for Urdu language a few predictors have been developed and these predictors lack in predictive performance. The paper in hand presents a precise and explainable deep learning predictor which makes use of advanced language modelling strategies for the extraction of semantic and discriminative patterns. Extracted patterns are utilized to train an attention-based novel classifier that is competent in precisely identifying hate content. Over coarse-grained benchmark dataset, the proposed predictor significantly outperforms state-of-the-art predictor by 8.7% in terms of accuracy, precision and F1-score. Similarly, over fine-grained dataset, in comparison with state-of-the-art predictor, it achieves performance gain of 10.6%, 17.6%, 18.6% and 17.6% in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score.