Investigating the role of swear words in abusive language detection tasks

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F22%3APTAFB3FB" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/22:PTAFB3FB - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09582-8" target="_blank" >https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09582-8</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09582-8" target="_blank" >10.1007/s10579-022-09582-8</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Investigating the role of swear words in abusive language detection tasks

Original language description

Swearing plays an ubiquitous role in everyday conversations among humans, both in oral and textual communication, and occurs frequently in social media texts, typically featured by informal language and spontaneous writing. Such occurrences can be linked to an abusive context, when they contribute to the expression of hatred and to the abusive effect, causing harm and offense. However, swearing is multifaceted and is often used in casual contexts, also with positive social functions. In this study, we explore the phenomenon of swearing in Twitter conversations, by automatically predicting the abusiveness of a swear word in a tweet as the main investigation perspective. We developed the Twitter English corpus SWAD (Swear Words Abusiveness Dataset), where abusive swearing is manually annotated at the word level. Our collection consists of 2577 instances in total from two phases of manual annotation. We developed models to automatically predict abusive swearing, to provide an intrinsic evaluation of SWAD and confirm the robustness of the resource. We model this prediction task as three different tasks, namely sequence labeling, text classification, and target-based swear word abusiveness prediction. We experimentally found that our intention to model the task similarly to aspect-based sentiment analysis leads to promising results. Subsequently, we employ the classifier to improve the prediction of abusive language in several standard benchmarks. The results of our experiments show that additional abusiveness feature of the swear words is able to improve the performance of abusive language detection models in several benchmark datasets.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

—

Continuities

—

Publication year

2022

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Language Resources and Evaluation [online]

ISSN

1574-0218

e-ISSN

1574-0218

Volume of the periodical

51

Issue of the periodical within the volume

1

Country of publishing house

NL - THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS

Number of pages

34

Pages from-to

155-188

UT code for WoS article

000757127500001

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85124731080