Offensive Language Detection Research Articles

Advancing offensive language detection in Arabic social media: a BERT-based ensemble learning approach

Advancing offensive language detection in Arabic social media: a BERT-based ensemble learning approach

DÉDUCTION EFFICACE DE LANGUE OFFENSIVE UTILISANT L'APPRENTISSAGE PROFONDE DANS LES MÉDIAS SOCIAUX

Offensive language detection is the technique of identifying and detecting user-generated offensive comments such as insults, pain, profanity, and racism that are targeted at a specific individual or group on social media. As social media platforms become more prominent, offensive language is used more frequently, becoming a major challenge in modern society. A novel effective offensive language classification (EOLC) technique has been proposed to overcome these challenges. English language tweets from YouTube and X (Twitter) with offensive, mild, swear, and non-offensive tweets are used in this paper. Initially, the tweets and comments are pre-processed, and the features are extracted using different techniques, namely term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), WordVec, and lexicon-based features. The extracted features are classified using the graph-based deep learning (GDL) method for numerical representation and decision-making. GDL network is optimized with red fox optimization (RFO) to normalize the weight and biases of the network and achieve better accuracy. The proposed GDL model achieves the highest levels of classification accuracy on the X (Twitter) and YouTube datasets, with 95.5 % and 96.8 %, respectively. The results obtained from GDL are more accurate and of higher quality than those obtained from traditional classifiers. The proposed EOLC method improves the overall accuracy by 5.56 %, 7.4 %, 7.7 %, and 10.2 % better than Text CNN, CNN-LSTM, DRNN, and LogitBoost, respectively.

OLF-ML: An Offensive Language Framework for Detection, Categorization, and Offense Target Identification Using Text Processing and Machine Learning Algorithms

The pervasiveness of offensive language on social media emphasizes the necessity of automated systems for identifying and categorizing content. To ensure a more secure online environment and improve communication, effective identification and categorization of this content is essential. However, existing research encounters challenges such as limited datasets and biased model performance, hindering progress in this domain. To address these challenges, this research presents a comprehensive framework that simplifies the utilization of support vector machines (SVM), random forest (RF) and artificial neural networks (ANN). The proposed methodology yields notable gains in offensive language detection, automatic categorization of offensiveness, and offense target identification tasks by utilizing the Offensive Language Identification Dataset (OLID). The simulation results indicate that SVM performs exceptionally well, exhibiting excellent accuracy scores (77%, 88%, and 68%), precision scores (76%, 87%, and 67%), F1 scores (57%, 88%, and 68%), and recall rates (45%, 88%, and 68%), proving to be practically successful in identifying and moderating offensive content on social media. By applying sophisticated preprocessing and meticulous hyperparameter tuning, our model outperforms some earlier research in detecting and categorizing offensive language tasks.

Detecting Offensive Language on Malay Social Media: A Zero-Shot, Cross-Language Transfer Approach Using Dual-Branch mBERT

Social media serves as a platform for netizens to stay informed and express their opinions through the Internet. Currently, the social media discourse environment faces a significant security threat—offensive comments. A group of users posts comments that are provocative, discriminatory, and objectionable, intending to disrupt online discussions, provoke others, and incite intergroup conflict. These comments undermine citizens’ legitimate rights, disrupt social order, and may even lead to real-world violent incidents. However, current automatic detection of offensive language primarily focuses on a few high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages, such as Malay, with insufficient annotated corpora for effective detection. To address this, we propose a zero-shot, cross-language unsupervised offensive language detection (OLD) method using a dual-branch mBERT transfer approach. Firstly, using the multi-language BERT (mBERT) model as the foundational language model, the first network branch automatically extracts features from both source and target domain data. Subsequently, Sinkhorn distance is employed to measure the discrepancy between the source and target language feature representations. By estimating the Sinkhorn distance between the labeled source language (e.g., English) and the unlabeled target language (e.g., Malay) feature representations, the method minimizes the Sinkhorn distance adversarially to provide more stable gradients, thereby extracting effective domain-shared features. Finally, offensive pivot words from the source and target language training sets are identified. These pivot words are then removed from the training data in a second network branch, which employs the same architecture. This process constructs an auxiliary OLD task. By concealing offensive pivot words in the training data, the model reduces overfitting and enhances robustness to the target language. In the end-to-end framework training, the combination of cross-lingual shared features and independent features culminates in unsupervised detection of offensive speech in the target language. The experimental results demonstrate that employing cross-language model transfer learning can achieve unsupervised detection of offensive content in low-resource languages. The number of labeled samples in the source language is positively correlated with transfer performance, and a greater similarity between the source and target languages leads to better transfer effects. The proposed method achieves the best performance in OLD on the Malay dataset, achieving an F1 score of 80.7%. It accurately identifies features of offensive speech, such as sarcasm, mockery, and implicit expressions, and showcases strong generalization and excellent stability across different target languages.

Towards Optimal NLP Solutions: Analyzing GPT and LLaMA-2 Models Across Model Scale, Dataset Size, and Task Diversity

This study carries out a comprehensive comparison of fine-tuned GPT models (GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-3.5) and LLaMA-2 models (LLaMA-2 7B, LLaMA-2 13B, LLaMA-2 70B) in text classification, addressing dataset sizes, model scales, and task diversity. Since its inception in 2018, the GPT series has been pivotal in advancing NLP, with each iteration introducing substantial enhancements. Despite its progress, detailed analyses, especially against competitive open-source models like the LLaMA-2 series in text classification, remain scarce. The current study fills this gap by fine-tuning these models across varied datasets, focusing on enhancing task-specific performance in hate speech and offensive language detection, fake news classification, and sentiment analysis. The learning efficacy and efficiency of the GPT and LLaMA-2 models were evaluated, providing a nuanced guide to choosing optimal models for NLP tasks based on architectural benefits and adaptation efficiency with limited data and resources. In particular, even with datasets as small as 1,000 rows per class, the F1 scores for the GPT-3.5 and LLaMA-2 models exceeded 0.9, reaching 0.99 with complete datasets. Additionally, the LLaMA-2 13B and 70B models outperformed GPT-3, demonstrating their superior efficiency and effectiveness in text classification. Both the GPT and LLaMA-2 series showed commendable performance on all three tasks, underscoring their ability to handle a diversity of tasks. Based on the size, performance, and resources required for fine-tuning the model, this study identifies LLaMA-2 13B as the most optimal model for NLP tasks.

A comprehensive review on Arabic offensive language and hate speech detection on social media: methods, challenges and solutions

A comprehensive review on Arabic offensive language and hate speech detection on social media: methods, challenges and solutions

Advancing NLP models with strategic text augmentation: A comprehensive study of augmentation methods and curriculum strategies

This study conducts a thorough evaluation of text augmentation techniques across a variety of datasets and natural language processing (NLP) tasks to address the lack of reliable, generalized evidence for these methods. It examines the effectiveness of these techniques in augmenting training sets to improve performance in tasks such as topic classification, sentiment analysis, and offensive language detection. The research emphasizes not only the augmentation methods, but also the strategic order in which real and augmented instances are introduced during training. A major contribution is the development and evaluation of Modified Cyclical Curriculum Learning (MCCL) for augmented datasets, which represents a novel approach in the field. Results show that specific augmentation methods, especially when integrated with MCCL, significantly outperform traditional training approaches in NLP model performance. These results underscore the need for careful selection of augmentation techniques and sequencing strategies to optimize the balance between speed and quality improvement in various NLP tasks. The study concludes that the use of augmentation methods, especially in conjunction with MCCL, leads to improved results in various classification tasks, providing a foundation for future advances in text augmentation strategies in NLP.

Enhancing Arabic offensive language detection with BERT-BiGRU model

With the advent of Web 2.0, various platforms and tools have been developed to allow internet users to express their opinions and thoughts on diverse topics and occurrences. Nevertheless, certain users misuse these platforms by sharing hateful and offensive speeches, which has a negative impact on the mental health of internet society. Thus, the detection of offensive language has become an active area of research in the field of natural language processing. Rapidly detecting offensive language on the internet and preventing it from spreading is of great practical significance in reducing cyberbullying and self-harm behaviors. Despite the crucial importance of this task, limited work has been done in this field for nonEnglish languages such as Arabic. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to improve the results of Arabic offensive language detection without the need for laborious preprocessing or feature engineering work. To achieve this, we combine the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model model with a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) layer to further enhance the extracted context and semantic features. The experiments were conducted on the Arabic dataset provided by the SemEval 2020 Task 12. The evaluation results show the effectiveness of our model compared to the baseline and related work models by achieving a macro F1- score of 93.16%.

A survey on multi-lingual offensive language detection.

The prevalence of offensive content on online communication and social media platforms is growing more and more common, which makes its detection difficult, especially in multilingual settings. The term "Offensive Language" encompasses a wide range of expressions, including various forms of hate speech and aggressive content. Therefore, exploring multilingual offensive content, that goes beyond a single language, focus and represents more linguistic diversities and cultural factors. By exploring multilingual offensive content, we can broaden our understanding and effectively combat the widespread global impact of offensive language. This survey examines the existing state of multilingual offensive language detection, including a comprehensive analysis on previous multilingual approaches, and existing datasets, as well as provides resources in the field. We also explore the related community challenges on this task, which include technical, cultural, and linguistic ones, as well as their limitations. Furthermore, in this survey we propose several potential future directions toward more efficient solutions for multilingual offensive language detection, enabling safer digital communication environment worldwide.

An inter-modal attention-based deep learning framework using unified modality for multimodal fake news, hate speech and offensive language detection

Fake news, hate speech and offensive language are related evil triplets currently affecting modern societies. Text modality for the computational detection of these phenomena has been widely used. In recent times, multimodal studies in this direction are attracting a lot of interests because of the potentials offered by other modalities in contributing to the detection of these menaces. However, a major problem in multimodal content understanding is how to effectively model the complementarity of the different modalities due to their diverse characteristics and features. From a multimodal point of view, the three tasks have been studied mainly using image and text modalities. Improving the effectiveness of the diverse multimodal approaches is still an open research topic. In addition to the traditional text and image modalities, we consider image–texts which are rarely used in previous studies but which contain useful information for enhancing the effectiveness of a prediction model. In order to ease multimodal content understanding and enhance prediction, we leverage recent advances in computer vision and deep learning for these tasks. First, we unify the modalities by creating a text representation of the images and image–texts, in addition to the main text. Secondly, we propose a multi-layer deep neural network with inter-modal attention mechanism to model the complementarity among these modalities. We conduct extensive experiments involving three standard datasets covering the three tasks. Experimental results show that detection of fake news, hate speech and offensive language can benefit from this approach. Furthermore, we conduct robust ablation experiments to show the effectiveness of our approach. Our model predominantly outperforms prior works across the datasets.

Filtering offensive language from multilingual social media contents: A deep learning approach

In the face of uncontrolled offensive content on social media, automated detection emerges as a critical need. This paper tackles this challenge by proposing a novel approach for identifying offensive language in multilingual, code-mixed, and script-mixed settings. The study presents a novel multilingual hybrid dataset constructed by merging diverse monolingual and bilingual resources. Further, we systematically evaluate the impact of input representations (Word2Vec, Global Vectors for Word Representation (or GloVe), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (or BERT), and uniform initialization) and deep learning models (Convolutional Neural Network (or CNN), Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (or Bi-LSTM), Bi-LSTM-Attention, and fine-tuned BERT) on detection accuracy. Our comprehensive experiments on a dataset of 42,560 social media comments from five languages (English, Hindi, German, Tamil, and Malayalam) reveal the superiority of fine-tuned BERT. Notably, it achieves a macro average F1-score of 0.79 for monolingual tasks and an impressive 0.86 for code-mixed and script-mixed tasks. These findings significantly advance offensive language detection methodologies and shed light on the complex dynamics of multilingual social media, paving the way for more inclusive and safer online communities.

Detecting Offensive Language Based on Graph Attention Networks and Fusion Features

The pervasiveness of offensive language on social networks has caused adverse effects on society, such as abusive behavior online. It is urgent to detect offensive language and curb its spread. In the popular datasets, the distribution of users and tweets is imbalanced, which limits the generalization ability of the model. In addition, existing research shows that methods with community information extracted from the social graphs effectively improve the performance of offensive language detection. However, the existing models deal with social graphs independently, which seriously affects the effectiveness of detection models. In this article, we release a new dataset with users and social relationships. To encode community information, we construct the social graphs based on the user historical behavior information and social relationships. Moreover, we propose a model based on graph attention networks (GATs) and fusion features for offensive language detection (GF-OLD). Specifically, the community information is directly captured by the GAT module, and the text embeddings are taken from the last hidden layer of bidirectional encoder representation from transformer (BERT). Attention mechanisms and position encoding are used to fuse these features. Our method outperforms baselines with the F1-score of 89.94%. The results show that our model effectively learns the potential information of social graphs and text, and user historical behavior information is more suitable for user attribute in the social graphs.

Offensive language and hate speech detection using deep learning in football news live streaming chat on YouTube in Thailand

Offensive language and hate speech detection using deep learning in football news live streaming chat on YouTube in Thailand

Offensive language detection in low resource languages: A use case of Persian language.

THIS ARTICLE USES WORDS OR LANGUAGE THAT IS CONSIDERED PROFANE, VULGAR, OR OFFENSIVE BY SOME READERS. Different types of abusive content such as offensive language, hate speech, aggression, etc. have become prevalent in social media and many efforts have been dedicated to automatically detect this phenomenon in different resource-rich languages such as English. This is mainly due to the comparative lack of annotated data related to offensive language in low-resource languages, especially the ones spoken in Asian countries. To reduce the vulnerability among social media users from these regions, it is crucial to address the problem of offensive language in such low-resource languages. Hence, we present a new corpus of Persian offensive language consisting of 6,000 out of 520,000 randomly sampled micro-blog posts from X (Twitter) to deal with offensive language detection in Persian as a low-resource language in this area. We introduce a method for creating the corpus and annotating it according to the annotation practices of recent efforts for some benchmark datasets in other languages which results in categorizing offensive language and the target of offense as well. We perform extensive experiments with three classifiers in different levels of annotation with a number of classical Machine Learning (ML), Deep learning (DL), and transformer-based neural networks including monolingual and multilingual pre-trained language models. Furthermore, we propose an ensemble model integrating the aforementioned models to boost the performance of our offensive language detection task. Initial results on single models indicate that SVM trained on character or word n-grams are the best performing models accompanying monolingual transformer-based pre-trained language model ParsBERT in identifying offensive vs non-offensive content, targeted vs untargeted offense, and offensive towards individual or group. In addition, the stacking ensemble model outperforms the single models by a substantial margin, obtaining 5% respective macro F1-score improvement for three levels of annotation.

Deep learning-based approaches for abusive content detection and classification for multi-class online user-generated data

With the rapid growth of social media culture, the use of offensive or hateful language has surged, which necessitates the development of effective abusive language detection models for online platforms. This paper focuses on developing a multi-class classification model to identify different types of offensive language. The input data is taken in the form of labeled tweets and is classified into offensive language detection, offensive language categorization, and offensive language target identification. The data undergoes pre-processing, which removes NaN value and punctuation, as well as performs tokenization followed by the generation of a word cloud to assess data quality. Further, the tf-idf technique is used for the selection of features. In the case of classifiers, multiple deep learning techniques, namely, bidirectional gated recurrent unit, multi-dense long short-term memory, bidirectional long short-term memory, gated recurrent unit, and long short-term memory, are applied where it has been found that all the models, except long short-term memory, achieved a high accuracy of 99.9 % for offensive language target identification. Bidirectional LSTM and multi-dense LSTM obtained the lowest loss and RMSE values of 0.01 and 0.1, respectively. This research provides valuable insights and contributes to the development of effective abusive language detection methods to promote a safe and respectful online environment. The insights gained can aid platform administrators in efficiently moderating content and taking appropriate actions against offensive language.

Elevating Offensive Language Detection: CNN-GRU and BERT for Enhanced Hate Speech Identification

Elevating Offensive Language Detection: CNN-GRU and BERT for Enhanced Hate Speech Identification

Offensive Language Detection for Low Resource Language Using Deep Sequence Model

Social media platforms are heavily used by people to express their views in their native languages. Besides positive views, people often use abusive or offensive language to express their anger or frustration. Resource-rich languages have offensive language detection systems which automatically monitor and block offensive content, however, they are very rare for low-resourced languages. This is because of the nonavailability of datasets for local languages. This article proposes a model which automatically detects offensive language for a very low-resource language, i.e., Pashto. The Roman Pashto dataset is created by picking 60 thousand comments from different social media and labeling them manually. The proposed model is trained and tested using three different feature extraction approaches, i.e., bag-of-words (BoW), term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), and sequence integer encoding. Four traditional classifiers and a deep sequence model are used to train on this task. Experimental result shows that the random forest classifier works best and give 94.07 % testing accuracy on a combination of unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams. The same classifier gives maximum accuracy of 93.90 % with TF-IDF. However, the overall highest testing accuracy of 97.21% is achieved by using bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM). The corpus created in this work is made available for the researcher working in this domain.

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A Novel Knowledge-augmented Model Customization Approach for Arabic Offensive Language Detection

Multiple attempts to develop systems for detecting online Arabic offensive language have been explored in previous studies. However, most of these attempts do not consider the variation of Arabic dialects, cultures, and offensive phrases. In contrast, this study aims to extract knowledge from multiple offensive language datasets to build a cross-dialect and culture knowledge-based repository. This knowledge-based repository is utilized to develop novel system architecture based on customizing the AraBERT model in a unique method to preserve dialectal knowledge and offensive cultural knowledge within the contextual word embedding of BERT architecture. Performance evaluation procedures consist of statistical evaluation metrics and a behavioral checklist. Results report more effective predictions by the customized model than the uncustomized one, particularly for offensive text. The customization process allows the model to gain more knowledge of informal text in general, and a better understanding of dialectal Arabic.

Hebrew offensive language taxonomy and dataset

Abstract This paper introduces a streamlined taxonomy for categorizing offensive language in Hebrew, addressing a gap in the literature that has, until now, largely focused on Indo-European languages. Our taxonomy divides offensive language into seven levels (six explicit and one implicit level). We based our work on the simplified offensive language (SOL) taxonomy introduced in (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk et al. 2021a) hoping that our adjustment of SOL to the Hebrew language will be capable of reflecting the unique linguistic and cultural nuances of Hebrew. The study involves both linguistic and cultural analysis beyond Natural Language Processing (NLP). We employed manual linguistic analysis to understand the nuances of offensive language in Hebrew. An accompanying dataset, gathered on Twitter and manually curated by human annotators, is described in detail. This dataset was constructed to both validate the taxonomy and serve as a foundation for future research on offensive language detection and analysis in Hebrew. Preliminary analysis of the dataset reveals intriguing patterns and distributions, underscoring the complexity and specificity of offensive expressions in the Hebrew language. The aim of our work is to capture the complexity and specificity of offensive expressions in Hebrew beyond what automated NLP methods alone can provide. Our findings highlight the significance of considering linguistic and cultural variations when researching and correcting abusive language online. We believe that our streamlined taxonomy and associated dataset will be crucial in improving research in Hebrew language sociocultural studies, natural language processing, and offensive language detection. Our study also makes a substantial contribution to the study of low-resource languages and can be used as a model for future research on other languages.