Stop PropagHate at SemEval-2019 tasks 5 and 6: Are abusive language classification results reproducible?

Abstract

This paper summarizes the participation of Stop PropagHate team at SemEval 2019. Our approach is based on replicating one of the most relevant works on the literature, using word embeddings and LSTM. After circumventing some of the problems of the original code, we found poor results when applying it to the HatEval contest (F1=0.45). We think this is due mainly to inconsistencies in the data of this contest. Finally, for the OffensEval the classifier performed well (F1=0.74), proving to have a better performance for offense detection than for hate speech.