MineriaUNAM at SemEval-2019 Task 5: Detecting Hate Speech in Twitter using Multiple Features in a Combinatorial Framework

Abstract

This paper presents our approach to the Task 5 of Semeval-2019, which aims at detecting hate speech against immigrants and women in Twitter. The task consists of two subtasks, in Spanish and English: (A) detection of hate speech and (B) classification of hateful tweets as aggressive or not, and identification of the target harassed as individual or group. We used linguistically motivated features and several types of n-grams (words, characters, functional words, punctuation symbols, POS, among others). For task A, we trained a Support Vector Machine using a combinatorial framework, whereas for task B we followed a multi-labeled approach using the Random Forest classifier. Our approach achieved the highest F1-score in sub-task A for the Spanish language.