Abstract: The context-dependent nature of online aggression makes annotating large collections of data extremely difficult. Previously studied datasets in abusive language detection have been insufficient in size to efficiently train deep learning models. Recently, Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter, a dataset much greater in size and reliability, has been released. However, this dataset has not been comprehensively studied to its potential. In this paper, we conduct the first comparative study of various learning models on Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter, and discuss the possibility of using additional features and context data for improvements. Experimental results show that bidirectional GRU networks trained on word-level features, with Latent Topic Clustering modules, is the most accurate model scoring 0.805 F1.

Introduction: Abusive language refers to any type of insult, vulgarity, or profanity that debases the target; it also can be anything that causes aggravation BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 . Abusive language is often reframed as, but not limited to, offensive language BIBREF2 , cyberbullying BIBREF3 , othering language BIBREF4 , and hate speech BIBREF5 . Recently, an increasing number of users have been subjected to harassment, or have witnessed offensive behaviors online BIBREF6 . Major social media companies (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) have utilized multiple resources—artificial intelligence, human reviewers, user reporting processes, etc.—in effort to censor offensive language, yet it seems nearly impossible to successfully resolve the issue BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 . The major reason of the failure in abusive language detection comes from its subjectivity and context-dependent characteristics BIBREF9 . For instance, a message can be regarded as harmless on its own, but when taking previous threads into account it may be seen as abusive, and vice versa. This aspect makes detecting abusive language extremely laborious even for human annotators; therefore it is difficult to build a large and reliable dataset BIBREF10 . Previously, datasets openly available in abusive language detection research on Twitter ranged from 10K to 35K in size BIBREF9 , BIBREF11 . This quantity is not sufficient to train the significant number of parameters in deep learning models. Due to this reason, these datasets have been mainly studied by traditional machine learning methods. Most recently, Founta et al. founta2018large introduced Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter, a dataset containing 100K tweets with cross-validated labels. Although this corpus has great potential in training deep models with its significant size, there are no baseline reports to date. This paper investigates the efficacy of different learning models in detecting abusive language. We compare accuracy using the most frequently studied machine learning classifiers as well as recent neural network models. Reliable baseline results are presented with the first comparative study on this dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate the effect of different features and variants, and describe the possibility for further improvements with the use of ensemble models.

Question: What additional features and context are proposed?
Answer: using tweets that one has replied or quoted to as contextual information