Hate Speech in the Arab Electronic Press and Social Networks

Abstract

Nowadays we are witnessing an open world, characterized by globalization which is accompanied by a technology through which information circulates without borders, especially with the widespread use of social networking sites being the most common communication tool, that gives access through various applications to a large space for the presentation of multiple ideas, including extremist ideas, and the spread of hate speech. This paper introduces a system of detection of hate speech in the texts of Arabic read media and social media, which is based on a combined use of NLP, and machine learning methods. The training of the detection model is done on a large Dataset of articles, tweets and comments, collected, balanced and tokenized afterwards using BERT in Arabic. The trained model detects hate speech in Arabic and various Arabic based dialects, by classifying the texts into two classes: Neutral and Abusive. The above-mentioned model is evaluated using precision metrics, recall and f1 score, it has reached an accuracy of 83%.