DeepHate: Hate Speech Detection via Multi-Faceted Text Representations

TL;DR

DeepHate is a deep learning model that integrates multiple textual features like embeddings, sentiment, and topics to improve hate speech detection accuracy on social media datasets.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-faceted text representation approach for hate speech detection, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

DeepHate achieves higher accuracy than state-of-the-art baselines.

Multi-faceted features significantly improve detection performance.

Case studies reveal key features that aid in identifying hate speech.

Abstract

Online hate speech is an important issue that breaks the cohesiveness of online social communities and even raises public safety concerns in our societies. Motivated by this rising issue, researchers have developed many traditional machine learning and deep learning methods to detect hate speech in online social platforms automatically. However, most of these methods have only considered single type textual feature, e.g., term frequency, or using word embeddings. Such approaches neglect the other rich textual information that could be utilized to improve hate speech detection. In this paper, we propose DeepHate, a novel deep learning model that combines multi-faceted text representations such as word embeddings, sentiments, and topical information, to detect hate speech in online social platforms. We conduct extensive experiments and evaluate DeepHate on three large publicly available real-world datasets. Our experiment results show that DeepHate outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on the hate speech detection task. We also perform case studies to provide insights into the salient features that best aid in detecting hate speech in online social platforms.