Cyberbullying Detection in Social Networks Using Deep Learning Based Models; A Reproducibility Study

TL;DR

This study reproduces and validates deep learning models for cyberbullying detection across multiple social networks, demonstrating their superior performance over traditional models and exploring their transferability between platforms.

Contribution

It reproduces recent deep learning approaches for cyberbullying detection, validates their effectiveness on multiple datasets, and evaluates their transferability to new social media platforms.

Findings

Deep learning models outperform traditional machine learning models on YouTube data.

Models trained on one platform can be transferred to another with varying success.

Deep learning models can benefit from additional user profile information.

Abstract

Cyberbullying is a disturbing online misbehaviour with troubling consequences. It appears in different forms, and in most of the social networks, it is in textual format. Automatic detection of such incidents requires intelligent systems. Most of the existing studies have approached this problem with conventional machine learning models and the majority of the developed models in these studies are adaptable to a single social network at a time. In recent studies, deep learning based models have found their way in the detection of cyberbullying incidents, claiming that they can overcome the limitations of the conventional models, and improve the detection performance. In this paper, we investigate the findings of a recent literature in this regard. We successfully reproduced the findings of this literature and validated their findings using the same datasets, namely Wikipedia, Twitter, and Formspring, used by the authors. Then we expanded our work by applying the developed methods on a new YouTube dataset (~54k posts by ~4k users) and investigated the performance of the models in new social media platforms. We also transferred and evaluated the performance of the models trained on one platform to another platform. Our findings show that the deep learning based models outperform the machine learning models previously applied to the same YouTube dataset. We believe that the deep learning based models can also benefit from integrating other sources of information and looking into the impact of profile information of the users in social networks.