A Literature Review of Textual Hate Speech Detection Methods and Datasets

Abstract

Online toxic discourses could result in conflicts between groups or harm to online communities. Hate speech is complex and multifaceted harmful or offensive content targeting individuals or groups. Existing literature reviews have generally focused on a particular category of hate speech, and to the best of our knowledge, no review has been dedicated to hate speech datasets. This paper systematically reviews textual hate speech detection systems and highlights their primary datasets, textual features, and machine learning models. The results of this literature review are integrated with content analysis, resulting in several themes for 138 relevant papers. This study shows several approaches that do not provide consistent results in various hate speech categories. The most dominant sets of methods combine more than one deep learning model. Moreover, the analysis of several hate speech datasets shows that many datasets are small in size and are not reliable for various tasks of hate speech detection. Therefore, this study provides the research community with insights and empirical evidence on the intrinsic properties of hate speech and helps communities identify topics for future work.