Leveraging time-dependent lexical features for offensive language detection

Abstract

We present a study on the integration of time-sensitive information in lexicon-based offensive language detection systems. Our focus is on Offenseval sub-task A, aimed at detecting offensive tweets. We apply a semantic change detection algorithm over a short time span of two years to detect words whose semantics has changed and we focus particularly on those words that acquired or lost an offensive meaning between 2019 and 2020. Using the output of this semantic change detection approach, we train an Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier on the Offenseval 2019 training set. We build on the already competitive SINAI system submitted to Offenseval 2019 by adding new lexical features, including those that capture the change in usage of words and their association with emerging offensive usages. We discuss the challenges, opportunities and limitations of integrating semantic change detection in offensive language detection models. Our work draws attention to an often neglected aspect of offensive language, namely that the meanings of words are constantly evolving and that NLP systems that account for this change can achieve good performance even when not trained on the most recent training data.