Towards non-toxic landscapes: Automatic toxic comment detection using DNN

Abstract

The spectacular expansion of the Internet has led to the development of a new research problem in the field of natural language processing: automatic toxic comment detection, since many countries prohibit hate speech in public media. There is no clear and formal definition of hate, offensive, toxic and abusive speeches. In this article, we put all these terms under the umbrella of "toxic" speech. The contribution of this paper is the design of binary classification and regression-based approaches aiming to predict whether a comment is toxic or not. We compare different unsupervised word representations and different DNN based classifiers. Moreover, we study the robustness of the proposed approaches to adversarial attacks by adding one (healthy or toxic) word. We evaluate the proposed methodology on the English Wikipedia Detox corpus. Our experiments show that using BERT fine-tuning outperforms feature-based BERT, Mikolov's and fastText representations with different DNN classifiers.

References in corpus (5)

• Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality
• Recent Trends in Deep Learning Based Natural Language Processing
• Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language
• Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding
• A Web of Hate: Tackling Hateful Speech in Online Social Spaces