AbuseAnalyzer: Abuse Detection, Severity and Target Prediction for Gab Posts

Abstract

While extensive popularity of online social media platforms has made information dissemination faster, it has also resulted in widespread online abuse of different types like hate speech, offensive language, sexist and racist opinions, etc. Detection and curtailment of such abusive content is critical for avoiding its psychological impact on victim communities, and thereby preventing hate crimes. Previous works have focused on classifying user posts into various forms of abusive behavior. But there has hardly been any focus on estimating the severity of abuse and the target. In this paper, we present a first of the kind dataset with 7,601 posts from Gab1 which looks at online abuse from the perspective of presence of abuse, severity and target of abusive behavior. We also propose a system to address these tasks, obtaining an accuracy of ∼80% for abuse presence, ∼82% for abuse target prediction, and ∼65% for abuse severity prediction.