arHateDetector: detection of hate speech from standard and dialectal Arabic Tweets

Abstract Hate speech has become a phenomenon on social media platforms, such as Twitter. These websites and apps that were initially designed to facilitate our expression of free speech, are sometimes being used to spread hate towards each other. In the Arab region, Twitter is a very popular social...

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Main Authors: Ramzi Khezzar, Abdelrahman Moursi, Zaher Al Aghbari
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer 2023-03-01
Series:Discover Internet of Things
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1007/s43926-023-00030-9
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author Ramzi Khezzar
Abdelrahman Moursi
Zaher Al Aghbari
author_facet Ramzi Khezzar
Abdelrahman Moursi
Zaher Al Aghbari
author_sort Ramzi Khezzar
collection DOAJ
description Abstract Hate speech has become a phenomenon on social media platforms, such as Twitter. These websites and apps that were initially designed to facilitate our expression of free speech, are sometimes being used to spread hate towards each other. In the Arab region, Twitter is a very popular social media platform and thus the number of tweets that contain hate speech is increasing rapidly. Many tweets are written either in standard, dialectal Arabic, or mix. Existing work on Arabic hate speech are targeted towards either standard or single dialectal text, but not both. To fight hate speech more efficiently, in this paper, we conducted extensive experiments to investigate Arabic hate speech in tweets. Therefore, we propose a framework, called arHateDetector, that detects hate speech in the Arabic text of tweets. The proposed arHateDetector supports both standard and several dialectal Arabic. A large Arabic hate speech dataset, called arHateDataset, was compiled from several Arabic standard and dialectal tweets. The tweets are preprocessed to remove the unwanted content. We investigated the use of recent machine learning and deep learning models such as AraBERT to detect hate speech. All classification models used in the investigation are trained with the compiled dataset. Our experiments shows that AraBERT outperformed the other models producing the best performance across seven different datasets including the compiled arHateDataset with an accuracy of 93%. CNN and LinearSVC produced 88% and 89% respectively.
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spelling doaj.art-7f9f68b56118484cb9c78e1ade711d602023-03-22T12:06:22ZengSpringerDiscover Internet of Things2730-72392023-03-013111310.1007/s43926-023-00030-9arHateDetector: detection of hate speech from standard and dialectal Arabic TweetsRamzi Khezzar0Abdelrahman Moursi1Zaher Al Aghbari2Department of Computer Science, University of SharjahDepartment of Computer Science, University of SharjahDepartment of Computer Science, University of SharjahAbstract Hate speech has become a phenomenon on social media platforms, such as Twitter. These websites and apps that were initially designed to facilitate our expression of free speech, are sometimes being used to spread hate towards each other. In the Arab region, Twitter is a very popular social media platform and thus the number of tweets that contain hate speech is increasing rapidly. Many tweets are written either in standard, dialectal Arabic, or mix. Existing work on Arabic hate speech are targeted towards either standard or single dialectal text, but not both. To fight hate speech more efficiently, in this paper, we conducted extensive experiments to investigate Arabic hate speech in tweets. Therefore, we propose a framework, called arHateDetector, that detects hate speech in the Arabic text of tweets. The proposed arHateDetector supports both standard and several dialectal Arabic. A large Arabic hate speech dataset, called arHateDataset, was compiled from several Arabic standard and dialectal tweets. The tweets are preprocessed to remove the unwanted content. We investigated the use of recent machine learning and deep learning models such as AraBERT to detect hate speech. All classification models used in the investigation are trained with the compiled dataset. Our experiments shows that AraBERT outperformed the other models producing the best performance across seven different datasets including the compiled arHateDataset with an accuracy of 93%. CNN and LinearSVC produced 88% and 89% respectively.https://doi.org/10.1007/s43926-023-00030-9Hate speechArabicTwitterMachine learningDeep learning
spellingShingle Ramzi Khezzar
Abdelrahman Moursi
Zaher Al Aghbari
arHateDetector: detection of hate speech from standard and dialectal Arabic Tweets
Discover Internet of Things
Hate speech
Arabic
Twitter
Machine learning
Deep learning
title arHateDetector: detection of hate speech from standard and dialectal Arabic Tweets
title_full arHateDetector: detection of hate speech from standard and dialectal Arabic Tweets
title_fullStr arHateDetector: detection of hate speech from standard and dialectal Arabic Tweets
title_full_unstemmed arHateDetector: detection of hate speech from standard and dialectal Arabic Tweets
title_short arHateDetector: detection of hate speech from standard and dialectal Arabic Tweets
title_sort arhatedetector detection of hate speech from standard and dialectal arabic tweets
topic Hate speech
Arabic
Twitter
Machine learning
Deep learning
url https://doi.org/10.1007/s43926-023-00030-9
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AT zaheralaghbari arhatedetectordetectionofhatespeechfromstandardanddialectalarabictweets