Detecting Toxicity Triggers in Online Discussions

Abstract

Despite the considerable interest in the detection of toxic comments, there has been little research investigating the causes -- i.e., triggers -- of toxicity. In this work, we first propose a formal definition of triggers of toxicity in online communities. We proceed to build an LSTM neural network model using textual features of comments, and then, based on a comprehensive review of previous literature, we incorporate topical and sentiment shift in interactions as features. Our model achieves an average accuracy of 82.5% of detecting toxicity triggers from diverse Reddit communities.