Question: What method do they analyze?
Evidence: Hate speech represents written or oral communication that in any way discredits a person or a group based on characteristics such as race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or religion BIBREF0. Hate speech targets disadvantaged social groups and harms them both directly and indirectly BIBREF1. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook, where hate speech frequently occurs, receive many critics for not doing enough to deal with it. As the connection between hate speech and the actual hate crimes is high BIBREF2, the importance of detecting and managing hate speech is not questionable. Early identification of users who promote such kind of communication can prevent an escalation from speech to action. However, automatic hate speech detection is difficult, especially when the text does not contain explicit hate speech keywords. Lexical detection methods tend to have low precision because, during classification, they do not take into account the contextual information those messages carry BIBREF3. Recently, contextual word and sentence embedding methods capture semantic and syntactic relation among the words and improve prediction accuracy.
Recent works on combining probabilistic Bayesian inference and neural network methodology attracted much attention in the scientific community BIBREF4. The main reason is the ability of probabilistic neural networks to quantify trustworthiness of predicted results. This information can be important, especially in tasks were decision making plays an important role BIBREF5. The areas which can significantly benefit from prediction uncertainty estimation are text classification tasks which trigger specific actions. Hate speech detection is an example of a task where reliable results are needed to remove harmful contents and possibly ban malicious users without preventing the freedom of speech. In order to assess the uncertainty of the predicted values, the neural networks require a Bayesian framework. On the other hand, Srivastava et al. BIBREF6 proposed a regularization approach, called dropout, which has a considerable impact on the generalization ability of neural networks. The approach drops some randomly selected nodes from the neural network during the training process. Dropout increases the robustness of networks and prevents overfitting. Different variants of dropout improved classification results in various areas BIBREF7. Gal and Ghahramani BIBREF8 exploited the interpretation of dropout as a Bayesian approximation and proposed a Monte Carlo dropout (MCD) approach to estimate the prediction uncertainty. In this paper, we analyze the applicability of Monte Carlo dropout in assessing the predictive uncertainty.
Our main goal is to accurately and reliably classify different forms of text as hate or non-hate speech, giving a probabilistic assessment of the prediction uncertainty in a comprehensible visual form. We also investigate the ability of deep neural network methods to provide good prediction accuracy on small textual data sets. The outline of the proposed methodology is presented in Figure FIGREF2.
Our main contributions are:
investigation of prediction uncertainty assessment to the area of text classification,
implementation of hate speech detection with reliability output,
evaluation of different contextual embedding approaches in the area of hate speech,
a novel visualization of prediction uncertainty and errors of classification models.
The paper consists of six sections. In Section 2, we present related works on hate speech detection, prediction uncertainty assessment in text classification context, and visualization of uncertainty. In Section 3, we propose the methodology for uncertainty assessment using dropout within neural network models, as well as our novel visualization of prediction uncertainty. Section 4 presents the data sets and the experimental scenario. We discuss the obtained results in Section 5 and present conclusions and ideas for further work in Section 6.
In this paper, we analyze the applicability of Monte Carlo dropout in assessing the predictive uncertainty.
Answer: Monte Carlo dropout (MCD) approach.