KDEHatEval at SemEval-2019 task 5: A neural network model for detecting hate speech in Twitter

Abstract

In the age of emerging volume of microblog platforms, especially twitter, hate speech propagation is now of great concern. However, due to the brevity of tweets and informal user generated contents, detecting and analyzing hate speech on twitter is a formidable task. In this paper, we present our approach for detecting hate speech in tweets defined in the SemEval-2019 Task 5. Our team KDEHatEval employs different neural network models including multi-kernel convolution (MKC), nested LSTMs (NLSTMs), and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) in a unified architecture. Moreover, we utilize the state-of-the-art pre-trained sentence embedding models including DeepMoji, InferSent, and BERT for effective tweet representation. We analyze the performance of our method and demonstrate the contribution of each component of our architecture.