Detection of abusive messages in an on-line community

Moderating user content in online communities is mainly performed manually, and reducing the workload through automatic methods is of great interest. The industry mainly uses basic approaches such as bad words filtering. In this article, we consider the task of automatically determining whether a message is abusive or not. This task is complex, because messages are written in a non-standardized natural language. We propose an original automatic moderation method applied to French, which is based on both traditional tools and a newly proposed context-based feature relying on the modeling of user behavior when reacting to a message. The results obtained during this preliminary study show the potential of the proposed method, in a context of automatic processing or decision support.