A key challenge for automatic hate-speech detection on social media is the separation of hate speech from other instances of offensive language. Lexical detection methods tend to have low precision because they classify all messages containing particular terms as hate speech and previous work using supervised learning has failed to distinguish between the two categories. We used a crowd-sourced hate speech lexicon to collect tweets containing hate speech keywords. We use crowd-sourcing to label a sample of these tweets into three categories: those containing hate speech, only offensive language, and those with neither. We train a multi-class classifier to distinguish between these different categories. Close analysis of the predictions and the errors shows when we can reliably separate hate speech from other offensive language and when this differentiation is more difficult. We find that racist and homophobic tweets are more likely to be classified as hate speech but that sexist tweets are generally classified as offensive. Tweets without explicit hate keywords are also more difficult to classify.
Other supervised approaches to hate speech classification have unfortunately conflated hate speech with offensive language, making it difficult to ascertain the extent to which they are really identifying hate speech @cite_0 @cite_13 . Neural language models show promise in the task but existing work has used training data has a similarly broad definition of hate speech @cite_1 . Non-linguistic features like the gender or ethnicity of the author can help improve hate speech classification but this information is often unavailable or unreliable on social media @cite_13 .
@cite_0 @cite_1 @cite_13
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A key challenge for automatic hate-speech detection on social media is the separation of hate speech from other instances of offensive language. Lexical detection methods tend to have low precision because they classify all messages containing particular terms as hate speech and previous work using supervised learning has failed to distinguish between the two categories. We used a crowd-sourced hate speech lexicon to collect tweets containing hate speech keywords. We use crowd-sourcing to label a sample of these tweets into three categories: those containing hate speech, only offensive language, and those with neither. We train a multi-class classifier to distinguish between these different categories. Close analysis of the predictions and the errors shows when we can reliably separate hate speech from other offensive language and when this differentiation is more difficult. We find that racist and homophobic tweets are more likely to be classified as hate speech but that sexist tweets are generally classified as offensive. Tweets without explicit hate keywords are also more difficult to classify. A key challenge for automatic hate-speech detection on social media is the separation of hate speech from other instances of offensive language. Lexical detection methods tend to have low precision because they classify all messages containing particular terms as hate speech and previous work using supervised learning has failed to distinguish between the two categories. We used a crowd-sourced hate speech lexicon to collect tweets containing hate speech keywords. We use crowd-sourcing to label a sample of these tweets into three categories: those containing hate speech, only offensive language, and those with neither. We train a multi-class classifier to distinguish between these different categories. Close analysis of the predictions and the errors shows when we can reliably separate hate speech from other offensive language and when this differentiation is more difficult. We find that racist and homophobic tweets are more likely to be classified as hate speech but that sexist tweets are generally classified as offensive. Tweets without explicit hate keywords are also more difficult to classify. In the wake of a polarizing election, social media is laden with hateful content. To address various limitations of supervised hate speech classification methods including corpus bias and huge cost of annotation, we propose a weakly supervised two-path bootstrapping approach for an online hate speech detection model leveraging large-scale unlabeled data. This system significantly outperforms hate speech detection systems that are trained in a supervised manner using manually annotated data. Applying this model on a large quantity of tweets collected before, after, and on election day reveals motivations and patterns of inflammatory language. We present an approach to detecting hate speech in online text, where hate speech is defined as abusive speech targeting specific group characteristics, such as ethnic origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. While hate speech against any group may exhibit some common characteristics, we have observed that hatred against each different group is typically characterized by the use of a small set of high frequency stereotypical words; however, such words may be used in either a positive or a negative sense, making our task similar to that of words sense disambiguation. In this paper we describe our definition of hate speech, the collection and annotation of our hate speech corpus, and a mechanism for detecting some commonly used methods of evading common "dirty word" filters. We describe pilot classification experiments in which we classify anti-semitic speech reaching an accuracy 94 , precision of 68 and recall at 60 , for an F1 measure of. 6375.