Automated hate speech detection and span extraction in underground hacking and extremist forums

Abstract Hate speech is any kind of communication that attacks a person or a group based on their characteristics, such as gender, religion and race. Due to the availability of online platforms where people can express their (hateful) opinions, the amount of hate speech is steadily increasing that often leads to offline hate crimes. This paper focuses on understanding and detecting hate speech in underground hacking and extremist forums where cybercriminals and extremists, respectively, communicate with each other, and some of them are associated with criminal activity. Moreover, due to the lengthy posts, it would be beneficial to identify the specific span of text containing hateful content in order to assist site moderators with the removal of hate speech. This paper describes a hate speech dataset composed of posts extracted from HackForums, an online hacking forum, and Stormfront and Incels.co, two extremist forums. We combined our dataset with a Twitter hate speech dataset to train a multi-platform classifier. Our evaluation shows that a classifier trained on multiple sources of data does not always improve the performance compared to a mono-platform classifier. Finally, this is the first work on extracting hate speech spans from longer texts. The paper fine-tunes BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and adopts two approaches – span prediction and sequence labelling. Both approaches successfully extract hateful spans and achieve an F1-score of at least 69%.