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Automatic Detection of Hateful Comments in Online Discussion

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Industrial Networks and Intelligent Systems (INISCOM 2016)

Abstract

Making violent threats towards minorities like immigrants or homosexuals is increasingly common on the Internet. We present a method to automatically detect threats of violence using machine learning. A material of 24,840 sentences from YouTube was manually annotated as violent threats or not, and was used to train and test the machine learning model. Detecting threats of violence works quit well with an error of classifying a violent sentence as not violent of about 10% when the error of classifying a non-violent sentence as violent is adjusted to 5%. The best classification performance is achieved by including features that combine specially chosen important words and the distance between those in the sentence.

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Correspondence to Hugo Lewi Hammer .

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© 2017 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Hammer, H.L. (2017). Automatic Detection of Hateful Comments in Online Discussion. In: Maglaras, L., Janicke, H., Jones, K. (eds) Industrial Networks and Intelligent Systems. INISCOM 2016. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 188. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52569-3_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52569-3_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52568-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52569-3

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