Detection and Comparison of Abusive and Hate Speech in English and Hinglish with Emojis using Deep Learning and Non-Deep Learning Techniques

Abstract

Abusive language and hate speech in tweets and comments on various social media platforms have become ubiquitous. This paper focuses on classifying an input text in English, Hindi and Hinglish (Hindi written in English) along with emojis and emoticons into three categories - Abusive, Hate Speech or Neither based on the confidence scores of each class. Abusive language on social media is textual content that contains disparaging words. Hate speech can be threatening and can hurt the sentiments of a person or a community. To gain better insights, results are captured with and without lemmatization and stemming. Accuracy is used as the metric to evaluate the classification models. Deep learning models BERT and RoBERTa are trained separately on plain English data (PE), Hinglish data along with emojis (HEmo) and the combined full dataset (CF). The same process is repeated for five non-deep learning models - Decision trees, k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest and Naïve Bayes. The deep learning model RoBERTa results in the highest accuracy of 0.9938 on the PE dataset, 0.9896 on the EHEmo dataset and 0.9899 on the CF dataset. SVM model performed best among traditional classifiers with an accuracy of 0.7996 on the PE dataset, 0.7899 on the EHEmo dataset and 0.7913 on the CF dataset.