Hate Speech Classification Using SVM and Naive BAYES

Abstract

The spread of hatred that was formerly limited to verbal communications has rapidly moved over the Internet. Social media and community forums that allow people to discuss and express their opinions are becoming platforms for the spreading of hate messages. Many countries have developed laws to avoid online hate speech. They hold the companies that run the social media responsible for their failure to eliminate hate speech. But as online content continues to grow, so does the spread of hate speech However, manual analysis of hate speech on online platforms is infeasible due to the huge amount of data as it is expensive and time consuming. Thus, it is important to automatically process the online user contents to detect and remove hate speech from online media. Many recent approaches suffer from interpretability problem which means that it can be difficult to understand why the systems make the decisions they do. Through this work, some solutions for the problem of automatic detection of hate messages were proposed using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naïve Bayes algorithms. This achieved near state-of-the-art performance while being simpler and producing more easily interpretable decisions than other methods. Empirical evaluation of this technique has resulted in a classification accuracy of approximately 99% and 50% for SVM and NB respectively over the test set.