AbuseAnalyzer: Abuse Detection, Severity and Target Prediction for Gab Posts
This work addresses the need for more nuanced abuse detection in social media to mitigate psychological impacts and prevent hate crimes, though it is incremental by extending existing classification tasks to include severity and target prediction.
The paper tackles the problem of online abuse detection by introducing a new dataset from Gab that includes severity and target labels, and proposes a system achieving ~80% accuracy for abuse presence, ~82% for target prediction, and ~65% for severity prediction.
While extensive popularity of online social media platforms has made information dissemination faster, it has also resulted in widespread online abuse of different types like hate speech, offensive language, sexist and racist opinions, etc. Detection and curtailment of such abusive content is critical for avoiding its psychological impact on victim communities, and thereby preventing hate crimes. Previous works have focused on classifying user posts into various forms of abusive behavior. But there has hardly been any focus on estimating the severity of abuse and the target. In this paper, we present a first of the kind dataset with 7601 posts from Gab which looks at online abuse from the perspective of presence of abuse, severity and target of abusive behavior. We also propose a system to address these tasks, obtaining an accuracy of ~80% for abuse presence, ~82% for abuse target prediction, and ~65% for abuse severity prediction.