Abstract: Detecting offensive language on Twitter has many applications ranging from detecting/predicting bullying to measuring polarization. In this paper, we focus on building effective Arabic offensive tweet detection. We introduce a method for building an offensive dataset that is not biased by topic, dialect, or target. We produce the largest Arabic dataset to date with special tags for vulgarity and hate speech. Next, we analyze the dataset to determine which topics, dialects, and gender are most associated with offensive tweets and how Arabic speakers use offensive language. Lastly, we conduct a large battery of experiments to produce strong results (F1 = 79.7) on the dataset using Support Vector Machine techniques.

Introduction: Disclaimer: Due to the nature of the paper, some examples contain highly offensive language and hate speech. They don't reflect the views of the authors in any way, and the point of the paper is to help fight such speech. Much recent interest has focused on the detection of offensive language and hate speech in online social media. Such language is often associated with undesirable online behaviors such as trolling, cyberbullying, online extremism, political polarization, and propaganda. Thus, offensive language detection is instrumental for a variety of application such as: quantifying polarization BIBREF0, BIBREF1, trolls and propaganda account detection BIBREF2, detecting the likelihood of hate crimes BIBREF3; and predicting conflict BIBREF4. In this paper, we describe our methodology for building a large dataset of Arabic offensive tweets. Given that roughly 1-2% of all Arabic tweets are offensive BIBREF5, targeted annotation is essential for efficiently building a large dataset. Since our methodology does not use a seed list of offensive words, it is not biased by topic, target, or dialect. Using our methodology, we tagged 10,000 Arabic tweet dataset for offensiveness, where offensive tweets account for roughly 19% of the tweets. Further, we labeled tweets as vulgar or hate speech. To date, this is the largest available dataset, which we plan to make publicly available along with annotation guidelines. We use this dataset to characterize Arabic offensive language to ascertain the topics, dialects, and users' gender that are most associated with the use of offensive language. Though we suspect that there are common features that span different languages and cultures, some characteristics of Arabic offensive language is language and culture specific. Thus, we conduct a thorough analysis of how Arabic users use offensive language. Next, we use the dataset to train strong Arabic offensive language classifiers using state-of-the-art representations and classification techniques. Specifically, we experiment with static and contextualized embeddings for representation along with a variety of classifiers such as a deep neural network classifier and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The contributions of this paper are as follows: We built the largest Arabic offensive language dataset to date that includes special tags for vulgar language and hate speech. We describe the methodology for building it along with annotation guidelines. We performed thorough analysis of the dataset and described the peculiarities of Arabic offensive language. We experimented with Support Vector Machine classifiers on character and word ngrams classification techniques to provide strong results on Arabic offensive language classification.

Question: How many annotators tagged each tweet?
Answer: One experienced annotator tagged all tweets