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Lexicon-Enhancement of Embedding-based Approaches Towards the Detection of Abusive Language

Detecting abusive language is a significant research topic, which has received a lot of attention recently. Our work focuses on detecting personal attacks in online conversations. As previous research on this task has largely used deep learning based on embeddings, we explore the use of lexicons to enhance embedding-based methods in an effort to see how these methods apply in the particular task of detecting personal attacks. The methods implemented and experimented with in this paper are quite different from each other, not only in the type of lexicons they use (sentiment or semantic), but also in the way they use the knowledge from the lexicons, in order to construct or to change embeddings that are ultimately fed into the learning model. The sentiment lexicon approaches focus on integrating sentiment information (in the form of sentiment embeddings) into the learning model. The semantic lexicon approaches focus on transforming the original word embeddings so that they better represent relationships extracted from a semantic lexicon. Based on our experimental results, semantic lexicon methods are superior to the rest of the methods in this paper, with at least 4% macro-averaged F1 improvement over the baseline.