Using Shallow and Deep Learning to Automatically Detect Hate Motivated by Gender and Sexual Orientation on Twitter in Spanish

Abstract

The increasing phenomenon of “cyberhate” is concerning because of the potential social implications of this form of verbal violence, which is aimed at already-stigmatized social groups. According to information collected by the Ministry of the Interior of Spain, the category of sexual orientation and gender identity is subject to the third-highest number of registered hate crimes, ranking behind racism/xenophobia and ideology. However, most of the existing computational approaches to online hate detection simultaneously attempt to address all types of discrimination, leading to weaker prototype performances. These approaches focus on other reasons for hate—primarily racism and xenophobia—and usually focus on English messages. Furthermore, few detection models have used manually generated databases as a training corpus. Using supervised machine learning techniques, the present research sought to overcome these limitations by developing and evaluating an automatic detector of hate speech motivated by gender and sexual orientation. The focus was Spanish-language posts on Twitter. For this purpose, eight predictive models were developed from an ad hoc generated training corpus, using shallow modeling and deep learning. The evaluation metrics showed that the deep learning algorithm performed significantly better than the shallow modeling algorithms, and logistic regression yielded the best performance of the shallow algorithms.