Aggressive, Repetitive, Intentional, Visible, and Imbalanced: Refining Representations for Cyberbullying Classification
This work addresses the need for better data and models for content moderators in social networks, though it is incremental in refining existing approaches.
The study tackled the problem of unreliable cyberbullying detection in online communities by introducing an annotation framework based on five explicit social and linguistic factors, which improved classifier performance.
Cyberbullying is a pervasive problem in online communities. To identify cyberbullying cases in large-scale social networks, content moderators depend on machine learning classifiers for automatic cyberbullying detection. However, existing models remain unfit for real-world applications, largely due to a shortage of publicly available training data and a lack of standard criteria for assigning ground truth labels. In this study, we address the need for reliable data using an original annotation framework. Inspired by social sciences research into bullying behavior, we characterize the nuanced problem of cyberbullying using five explicit factors to represent its social and linguistic aspects. We model this behavior using social network and language-based features, which improve classifier performance. These results demonstrate the importance of representing and modeling cyberbullying as a social phenomenon.