Detection of Racist Language in French Tweets

Abstract

Toxic online content has become a major issue in recent years due to the exponential increase in the use of the internet. In France, there has been a significant increase in hate speech against migrant and Muslim communities following events such as Great Britain’s exit from the EU, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and the Bataclan attacks. Therefore, the automated detection of offensive language and racism is in high demand, and it is a serious challenge. Unfortunately, there are fewer datasets annotated for racist speech than for general hate speech available, especially for French. This paper attempts to breach this gap by (1) proposing and evaluating a new dataset intended for automated racist speech detection in French; (2) performing a case study with multiple supervised models and text representations for the task of racist language detection in French; and (3) performing cross-lingual experiments.