Towards Non-Toxic Landscapes: Automatic Toxic Comment Detection Using DNN

Ashwin Geet D’Sa, Irina Illina, Dominique Fohr


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.
Anthology ID:
2020.trac-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Ritesh Kumar, Atul Kr. Ojha, Bornini Lahiri, Marcos Zampieri, Shervin Malmasi, Vanessa Murdock, Daniel Kadar
Venue:
TRAC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
21–25
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.trac-1.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ashwin Geet D’Sa, Irina Illina, and Dominique Fohr. 2020. Towards Non-Toxic Landscapes: Automatic Toxic Comment Detection Using DNN. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying, pages 21–25, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Towards Non-Toxic Landscapes: Automatic Toxic Comment Detection Using DNN (D’Sa et al., TRAC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.trac-1.4.pdf