Hate versus Politics: Detection of Hate against Policy makers in Italian tweets
This work addresses the need for hate speech detection tools in Italian political contexts, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new language and domain.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting hate speech against policy makers in Italian tweets by creating the first annotated dataset of 1264 tweets for this language and domain, achieving a performance of ROC AUC 0.83 in classification tasks.
Accurate detection of hate speech against politicians, policy making and political ideas is crucial to maintain democracy and free speech. Unfortunately, the amount of labelled data necessary for training models to detect hate speech are limited and domain-dependent. In this paper, we address the issue of classification of hate speech against policy makers from Twitter in Italian, producing the first resource of this type in this language. We collected and annotated 1264 tweets, examined the cases of disagreements between annotators, and performed in-domain and cross-domain hate speech classifications with different features and algorithms. We achieved a performance of ROC AUC 0.83 and analyzed the most predictive attributes, also finding the different language features in the anti-policymakers and anti-immigration domains. Finally, we visualized networks of hashtags to capture the topics used in hateful and normal tweets.