Textual Aggression Detection through Deep Learning

ANTONELA TOMMASEL; DANIELA GODOY; JUAN MANUEL RODRIGUEZ

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Workshop; 1st Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying en 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018); 2018

Cyberbullying and cyberaggression are serious and widespread issues increasingly affecting Internet users. With the widespread of social media networks, bullying, once limited to particular places, can now occur anytime and anywhere. Cyberaggression refers to aggressive online behaviour that aims at harming other individuals, and involves rude, insulting, offensive, teasing or demoralising comments through online social media. Considering the dangerous consequences that cyberaggression has on its victims and its rapid spread amongst internet users (specially kids and teens), it is crucial to understand how cyberbullying occurs to prevent it from escalating. Given the massive information overload on the Web, there is an imperious need to develop intelligent techniques to automatically detect harmful content, which would allow the large-scale social media monitoring and early detection of undesired situations. This paper presents the Isistanitos?s approach for detecting aggressive content in multiple social media sites. The approach is based on combining Support Vector Machines and Recurrent Neural Network models for analysing a wide-range of character, word, word embeddings, sentiment and irony features. Results confirmed the difficulty of the task (particularly for detecting covert aggressions), showing the limitations of traditionally used features.