Offensive language detection using multi-level classification

Abstract

Text messaging through the Internet or cellular phones has become a major medium of personal and commercial communication. In the same time, flames (such as rants, taunts, and squalid phrases) are offensive/abusive phrases which might attack or offend the users for a variety of reasons. An automatic discriminative software with a sensitivity parameter for flame or abusive language detection would be a useful tool. Although a human could recognize these sorts of useless annoying texts among the useful ones, it is not an easy task for computer programs. In this paper, we describe an automatic flame detection method which extracts features at different conceptual levels and applies multi-level classification for flame detection. While the system is taking advantage of a variety of statistical models and rule-based patterns, there is an auxiliary weighted pattern repository which improves accuracy by matching the text to its graded entries. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.