Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Classify Hate-Speech

The paper introduces a deep learningbased Twitter hate-speech text classification system. The classifier assigns each tweet to one of four predefined categories: racism, sexism, both (racism and sexism) and non-hate-speech. Four Convolutional Neural Network models were trained on resp. character 4-grams, word vectors based on semantic information built using word2vec, randomly generated word vectors, and word vectors combined with character n-grams. The feature set was down-sized in the networks by maxpooling, and a softmax function used to classify tweets. Tested by 10-fold crossvalidation, the model based on word2vec embeddings performed best, with higher precision than recall, and a 78.3% F-score.

• MŠ
  Ministerstvo Školství, Mládeže a Tělovýchovy
• NF
  Norges Forskningsråd
• NG
  Norway Grants