XRBi-GAC: A hybrid deep learning framework for multilingual toxicity detection

Abstract

Social media platforms allow people across the globe to share their thoughts and opinions and conveniently communicate with each other. Apart from various advantages of social media, it is also misused by a set of users for hate-mongering with toxic and offensive comments. The majority of the earlier proposed toxicity detection methods are primarily focused on the English language, but there is a lack of research on low-resource languages and multilingual text data. We propose an XRBi-GAC framework comprising XLM-RoBERTa, Bi-GRU with self-attention and capsule networks for multilingual toxic text detection. A loss function is also presented, which fuses the binary cross-entropy loss and focal loss to address the class imbalance problem. We evaluated the proposed framework on two datasets, namely, the Jigsaw Multilingual Toxic Comment dataset and HASOC 2019 dataset and achieved F1-score of 0.865 and 0.829, respectively. The results of the experiments show that the proposed framework has outperformed the state-of-the-art multilingual models XLM-RoBERTa and mBERT on both datasets, which shows the versatility and robustness of the proposed XRBi-GAC framework.