Evaluating feature combination strategies for hate-speech detection in Spanish using linguistic features and transformers

The rise of social networks has allowed misogynistic, xenophobic, and homophobic people to spread their hate-speech to intimidate individuals or groups because of their gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The consequences of hate-speech are devastating, causing severe depression and even leadin...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: García Díaz, José Antonio, Jiménez Zafra, Salud María, García Cumbreras, Miguel Ángel, Valencia García, Rafael
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Jaén
Repositorio:RUJA. Repositorio Institucional de la Producción Científica de la Universidad de Jaén
OAI Identifier:oai:ruja.ujaen.es:10953/7459
Acceso en línea:https://doi.org/10.1007/s40747-022-00693-x
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40747-022-00693-x
https://hdl.handle.net/10953/7459
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Hate-speech
Feature engineering
Knowledge integration
Text classification
Natural language processing
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Descripción
Sumario:The rise of social networks has allowed misogynistic, xenophobic, and homophobic people to spread their hate-speech to intimidate individuals or groups because of their gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The consequences of hate-speech are devastating, causing severe depression and even leading people to commit suicide. Hate-speech identification is challenging as the large amount of daily publications makes it impossible to review every comment by hand. Moreover, hate-speech is also spread by hoaxes that requires language and context understanding. With the aim of reducing the number of comments that should be reviewed by experts, or even for the development of autonomous systems, the automatic identification of hate-speech has gained academic relevance. However, the reliability of automatic approaches is still limited specifically in languages other than English, in which some of the state-of-the-art techniques have not been analyzed in detail. In this work, we examine which features are most effective in identifying hate-speech in Spanish and how these features can be combined to develop more accurate systems. In addition, we characterize the language present in each type of hate-speech by means of explainable linguistic features and compare our results with state-of-the-art approaches. Our research indicates that combining linguistic features and transformers by means of knowledge integration outperforms current solutions regarding hate-speech identification in Spanish.