UVA Wahoos at SemEval-2019 task 6: Hate speech identification using ensemble machine learning

Abstract

With the growth in the usage of social media, it has become increasingly common for people to hide behind a mask and abuse others. We have attempted to detect such tweets and comments that are malicious in intent, which either targets an individual or a group. Our best classifier for identifying offensive tweets for SubTask A (Classifying offensive vs. non-offensive) has an accuracy of 83.14% and a f1-score of 0.7565 on the actual test data. For SubTask B, to identify if an offensive tweet is targeted (If targeted towards an individual or a group), the classifier performs with an accuracy of 89.17% and f1-score of 0.5885. The paper talks about how we generated linguistic and semantic features to build an ensemble machine learning model. By training with more extracts from different sources (Face-book, and more tweets), the paper shows how the accuracy changes with additional training data.