Convolutional Neural Networks for Toxic Comment Classification

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for classifying toxic comments, demonstrating their superiority over traditional bag-of-words methods in a large Wikipedia dataset.

Contribution

It introduces CNN-based models for toxic comment detection and compares their performance against traditional methods, showing improved accuracy.

Findings

CNNs outperform bag-of-words in toxic comment classification

Deep learning approaches show promising results in text analytics

CNNs reinforce research interest in modern text classification methods

Abstract

Flood of information is produced in a daily basis through the global Internet usage arising from the on-line interactive communications among users. While this situation contributes significantly to the quality of human life, unfortunately it involves enormous dangers, since on-line texts with high toxicity can cause personal attacks, on-line harassment and bullying behaviors. This has triggered both industrial and research community in the last few years while there are several tries to identify an efficient model for on-line toxic comment prediction. However, these steps are still in their infancy and new approaches and frameworks are required. On parallel, the data explosion that appears constantly, makes the construction of new machine learning computational tools for managing this information, an imperative need. Thankfully advances in hardware, cloud computing and big data management allow the development of Deep Learning approaches appearing very promising performance so far. For text classification in particular the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have recently been proposed approaching text analytics in a modern manner emphasizing in the structure of words in a document. In this work, we employ this approach to discover toxic comments in a large pool of documents provided by a current Kaggle's competition regarding Wikipedia's talk page edits. To justify this decision we choose to compare CNNs against the traditional bag-of-words approach for text analysis combined with a selection of algorithms proven to be very effective in text classification. The reported results provide enough evidence that CNN enhance toxic comment classification reinforcing research interest towards this direction.