Intelligent detection of hate speech in Arabic social network: A machine learning approach

Abstract

Nowadays, cyber hate speech is increasingly growing, which forms a serious problem worldwide by threatening the cohesion of civil societies. Hate speech relates to using expressions or phrases that are violent, offensive or insulting for a person or a minority of people. In particular, in the Arab region, the number of Arab social media users is growing rapidly, which is accompanied with high increasing rate of cyber hate speech. This drew our attention to aspire healthy online environments that are free of hatred and discrimination. Therefore, this article aims to detect cyber hate speech based on Arabic context over Twitter platform, by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, and machine learning methods. The article considers a set of tweets related to racism, journalism, sports orientation, terrorism and Islam. Several types of features and emotions are extracted and arranged in 15 different combinations of data. The processed dataset is experimented using Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT) and Random Forest (RF), in which RF with the feature set of Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and profile-related features achieves the best results. Furthermore, a feature importance analysis is conducted based on RF classifier in order to quantify the predictive ability of features in regard to the hate class.