Improving Cross-Domain Hate Speech Detection by Reducing the False Positive Rate

Abstract

Hate speech detection is an actively growing field of research with a variety of recently proposed approaches that allowed to push the state-of-the-art results. One of the challenges of such automated approaches – namely recent deep learning models – is a risk of false positives (i.e., false accusations), which may lead to over-blocking or removal of harmless social media content in applications with little moderator intervention. We evaluate deep learning models both under in-domain and cross-domain hate speech detection conditions, and introduce an SVM approach that allows to significantly improve the state-of-the-art results when combined with the deep learning models through a simple majority-voting ensemble. The improvement is mainly due to a reduction of the false positive rate.