Offensive language detection in Hebrew: can other languages help?

Abstract

Unfortunately, offensive language in social media is a common phenomenon nowadays. It harms many people and vulnerable groups. Therefore, automated detection of offensive language is in high demand and it is a serious challenge in multilingual domains. Various machine learning approaches combined with natural language techniques have been applied for this task lately. This paper contributes to this area from several aspects: (1) it introduces a new dataset of annotated Facebook comments in Hebrew; (2) it describes a case study with multiple supervised models and text representations for a task of offensive language detection in three languages, including two Semitic (Hebrew and Arabic) languages; (3) it reports evaluation results of cross-lingual and multilingual learning for detection of offensive content in Semitic languages; and (4) it discusses the limitations of these settings.

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