Hate Speech Detection Using Genetic Programming

Abstract

There has been a steep increase in the use of social media in our everyday lives in recent years. Along with this, there has been an increase in hate speech disseminated on these platforms, due to the anonymity of the users as well as the ease of use. Social media platforms need to filter and prevent the spread of hate speech to protect their users and society. Due to the high traffic, automatic detection of hate speech is necessary. Hate speech detection is one of the most difficult classification challenges in text mining. Research in this domain focuses on the use of supervised machine learning approaches, such as support vector machine, logistic regression, convolutional neural network, and random forest. Ensemble techniques have also been employed. However, the performance of these approaches has not yet reached an acceptable level. In this paper, we propose the use of the Genetic Programming (GP) approach for binary classification of hate speech on social media platforms. Each individual in the GP framework represents a classifier that is evolved to optimize Fl-score. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our GP approach; the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art using the same dataset HatEval.