Towards non-toxic landscapes: Automatic toxic comment detection using DNN
This work addresses the problem of detecting toxic content online for platforms and users, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a known task.
The paper tackles automatic toxic comment detection by designing binary classification and regression approaches, and finds that BERT fine-tuning outperforms other word representations and DNN classifiers on the Wikipedia Detox corpus.
The spectacular expansion of the Internet has led to the development of a new research problem in the field of natural language processing: automatic toxic comment detection, since many countries prohibit hate speech in public media. There is no clear and formal definition of hate, offensive, toxic and abusive speeches. In this article, we put all these terms under the umbrella of "toxic" speech. The contribution of this paper is the design of binary classification and regression-based approaches aiming to predict whether a comment is toxic or not. We compare different unsupervised word representations and different DNN based classifiers. Moreover, we study the robustness of the proposed approaches to adversarial attacks by adding one (healthy or toxic) word. We evaluate the proposed methodology on the English Wikipedia Detox corpus. Our experiments show that using BERT fine-tuning outperforms feature-based BERT, Mikolov's and fastText representations with different DNN classifiers.