Detecting Arabic Cyberbullying Tweets Using Machine Learning

Abstract

The advancement of technology has paved the way for a new type of bullying, which often leads to negative stigma in the social setting. Cyberbullying is a cybercrime wherein one individual becomes the target of harassment and hatred. It has recently become more prevalent due to a rise in the usage of social media platforms, and, in some severe situations, it has even led to victims’ suicides. In the literature, several cyberbullying detection methods are proposed, but they are mainly focused on word-based data and user account attributes. Furthermore, most of them are related to the English language. Meanwhile, only a few papers have studied cyberbullying detection in Arabic social media platforms. This paper, therefore, aims to use machine learning in the Arabic language for automatic cyberbullying detection. The proposed mechanism identifies cyberbullying using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier algorithm by using a real dataset obtained from YouTube and Twitter to train and test the classifier. Moreover, we include the Farasa tool to overcome text limitations and improve the detection of bullying attacks.