With the penetration of internet among masses, the content being posted on social media channels has uptaken. Specifically, in the Indian subcontinent, number of Internet users has crossed 500 mi, and is rising rapidly due to inexpensive data. With this rise, comes the problem of hate speech, offensive and abusive posts on social media. Although there are many previous works which deal with Hindi and English hate speech (the top two languages in India), but very few on the code-switched version (Hinglish) of the two BIBREF0 . This is partially due to the following reasons: (i) Hinglish consists of no-fixed grammar and vocabulary. It derives a part of its semantics from Devnagari and another part from the Roman script. (ii) Hinglish speech and written text consists of a concoction of words spoken in Hindi as well as English, but written in the Roman script. This makes the spellings variable and dependent on the writer of the text. Hence code-switched languages present tough challenges in terms of parsing and getting the meaning out of the text. For instance, the sentence, “Modiji foreign yatra par hai”, is in the Hinglish language. Somewhat correct translation of this would be, “Mr. Modi is on a foriegn tour”. However, even this translation has some flaws due to no direct translation available for the word ji, which is used to show respect. Verbatim translation would lead to “Mr. Modi foreign tour on is”. Moreover, the word yatra here, can have phonetic variations, which would result in multiple spellings of the word as yatra, yaatra, yaatraa, etc. Also, the problem of hate speech has been rising in India, and according to the policies of the government and the various social networks, one is not allowed to misuse his right to speech to abuse some other community or religion. Due to the various difficulties associated with the Hinglish language, it is challenging to automatically detect and ban such kind of speech.Thus, with this in mind, we build a transfer learning based model for the code-switched language Hinglish, which outperforms the baseline model of BIBREF0 . We also release the embeddings and the model trained.Our methodology primarily consists of these steps: Pre-processing of the dataset, training of word embeddings, training of the classifier model and then using that on HEOT dataset.In this work, we use the datasets released by BIBREF1 and HEOT dataset provided by BIBREF0 . The datasets obtained pass through these steps of processing: (i) Removal of punctuatios, stopwords, URLs, numbers, emoticons, etc. This was then followed by transliteration using the Xlit-Crowd conversion dictionary and translation of each word to English using Hindi to English dictionary. To deal with the spelling variations, we manually added some common variations of popular Hinglish words. Final dictionary comprised of 7200 word pairs. Additionally, to deal with profane words, which are not present in Xlit-Crowd, we had to make a profanity dictionary (with 209 profane words) as well. Table TABREF3 gives some examples from the dictionary.We tried Glove BIBREF2 and Twitter word2vec BIBREF3 code for training embeddings for the processed tweets. The embeddings were trained on both the datasets provided by BIBREF1 and HEOT. These embeddings help to learn distributed representations of tweets. After experimentation, we kept the size of embeddings fixed to 100.Both the HEOT and BIBREF1 datasets contain tweets which are annotated in three categories: offensive, abusive and none (or benign). Some examples from the dataset are shown in Table TABREF4 . We use a LSTM based classifier model for training our model to classify these tweets into these three categories. An overview of the model is given in the Figure FIGREF12 . The model consists of one layer of LSTM followed by three dense layers. The LSTM layer uses a dropout value of 0.2. Categorical crossentropy loss was used for the last layer due to the presence of multiple classes. We use Adam optimizer along with L2 regularisation to prevent overfitting. As indicated by the Figure FIGREF12 , the model was initially trained on the dataset provided by BIBREF1 , and then re-trained on the HEOT dataset so as to benefit from the transfer of learned features in the last stage. The model hyperparameters were experimentally selected by trying out a large number of combinations through grid search.Table TABREF9 shows the performance of our model (after getting trained on BIBREF1 ) with two types of embeddings in comparison to the models by BIBREF0 and BIBREF1 on the HEOT dataset averaged over three runs. We also compare results on pre-trained embeddings. As shown in the table, our model when given Glove embeddings performs better than all other models. For comparison purposes, in Table TABREF10 we have also evaluated our results on the dataset by BIBREF1 .In this paper, we presented a pipeline which given Hinglish text can classify it into three categories: offensive, abusive and benign. This LSTM based model performs better than the other systems present. We also release the code, the dictionary made and the embeddings trained in the process. We believe this model would be useful in hate speech detection tasks for code-switched languages.

Q: Do all the instances contain code-switching?

Q: What embeddings do they use?

Q: Do they perform some annotation?

Q: Do they use dropout?

Q: What definition of hate speech do they use?