Predictive Embeddings for Hate Speech Detection on Twitter

We present a neural-network based approach to classifying online hate speech in general, as well as racist and sexist speech in particular. Using pre-trained word embeddings and max/mean pooling from simple, fully-connected transformations of these embeddings, we are able to predict the occurrence of hate speech on three commonly used publicly available datasets. Our models match or outperform state of the art F1 performance on all three datasets using significantly fewer parameters and minimal feature preprocessing compared to previous methods.

Detecting and Explaining Crisis

Individuals on social media may reveal themselves to be in various states of crisis (e.g. suicide, self-harm, abuse, or eating disorders). Detecting crisis from social media text automatically and accurately can have profound consequences. However, detecting a general state of crisis without explaining why has limited applications. An explanation in this context is a coherent, concise subset of the text that rationalizes the crisis detection. We explore several methods to detect and explain crisis using a combination of neural and non-neural techniques. We evaluate these techniques on a unique data set obtained from Koko, an anonymous emotional support network available through various messaging applications. We annotate a small subset of the samples labeled with crisis with corresponding explanations. Our best technique significantly outperforms the baseline for detection and explanation.