Hate speech on social media is a growing concern, and automated methods have so far been sub-par at reliably detecting it. A major challenge lies in the potentially evasive nature of hate speech due to the ambiguity and fast evolution of natural language. To tackle this, we introduce a vectorisation based on a crowd-sourced and continuously updated dictionary of hate words and propose fusing this approach with standard word embedding in order to improve the classification performance of a CNN model. To train and test our model we use a merge of two established datasets (110,748 tweets in total). By adding the dictionary-enhanced input, we are able to increase the CNN model's predictive power and increase the F1 macro score by seven percentage points.
@article{arxiv.2103.08780,
title = {dictNN: A Dictionary-Enhanced CNN Approach for Classifying Hate Speech on Twitter},
author = {Maximilian Kupi and Michael Bodnar and Nikolas Schmidt and Carlos Eduardo Posada},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.08780},
year = {2021}
}