A Federated Approach for Hate Speech Detection

Hate speech detection has been the subject of high research attention, due to the scale of content created on social media. In spite of the attention and the sensitive nature of the task, privacy preservation in hate speech detection has remained under-studied. The majority of research has focused on centralised machine learning infrastructures which risk leaking data. In this paper, we show that using federated machine learning can help address privacy the concerns that are inherent to hate speech detection while obtaining up to 6.81% improvement in terms of F1-score.

A Federated Approach to Predicting Emojis in Hindi Tweets

The use of emojis affords a visual modality to, often private, textual communication. The task of predicting emojis however provides a challenge for machine learning as emoji use tends to cluster into the frequently used and the rarely used emojis. Much of the machine learning research on emoji use has focused on high resource languages and has conceptualised the task of predicting emojis around traditional server-side machine learning approaches. However, traditional machine learning approaches for private communication can introduce privacy concerns, as these approaches require all data to be transmitted to a central storage. In this paper, we seek to address the dual concerns of emphasising high resource languages for emoji prediction and risking the privacy of people's data. We introduce a new dataset of $118$k tweets (augmented from $25$k unique tweets) for emoji prediction in Hindi, and propose a modification to the federated learning algorithm, CausalFedGSD, which aims to strike a balance between model performance and user privacy. We show that our approach obtains comparative scores with more complex centralised models while reducing the amount of data required to optimise the models and minimising risks to user privacy.