Online Social Networks and Media 19 (2020) 100096

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Online Social Networks and Media

journal homepage: www.journals.elsevier.com/online-social-networks-and-media

Hate and offensive speech detection on Arabic social media

Safa Alsafari *, a, b, Samira Sadaoui a, Malek Mouhoub a
a
University of Regina, Regina, Canada
b
University of Jeddah, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: We are witnessing an increasing proliferation of hate speech on social media targeting individuals for their
Hate speech protected characteristics. Our study aims to devise an effective Arabic hate and offensive speech detection
Social media framework to address this serious issue. First, we built a reliable Arabic textual corpus by crawling data from
Arabic corpus
Twitter using four robust extraction strategies that we implement based on four types of hate: religion, ethnicity,
Data extraction
Data annotation
nationality, and gender. Next, we label the corpus based on a three-hierarchical annotation scheme in which we
Feature extraction verify the inter annotation agreement to ensure ground truth at each level. Based on machine and deep learning
Multi-class classification techniques, we develop numerous two-class, three-class, and six-class classification models that we combine with
Deep learning a variety of feature extraction techniques, such as contextual word embeddings. Finally, we conduct an intensive
experiment to assess the performance of the different learned models and to examine the misclassification errors.
The performance results are very encouraging compared to prior hate and offensive speech studies carried out on
Arabic and other languages.

1. Introduction becomes vital.

1.1. Scope
In the last decade, the systematic detection of hate speech and other
offensive language has attracted the attention from many scholars due to
the increasing proliferation of harmful and offensive content on social
network sites. The majority of these sites have hate speech policies in
place that prohibit any posts that attack or threaten individuals or
groups based on their protected characteristics, such as race, ethnicity,
religion, gender, and nationality. Nevertheless, filtering hate speech still
relies heavily on reporting misconduct on the one hand, and monitoring
by moderators on the other hand. Manually monitoring the tremendous
volume of content on social media is a laborious task. Consequently,
several research studies emerged in the hate speech detection domain as
well as competitions and workshops, such as TRAC 2019 [1], HateEval
2019 [2] and OffensEval 2019 [3], which clearly emphasize the growing
significance of this subject. Hate speech detection is usually modelled as
a supervised classification problem where the learning algorithms are
trained on datasets that comprise some form of abusive and hateful
language. In this present article, we are particularly interested in Arabic
Twitter because of the increasing rate of hateful and offensive content on
this platform. Therefore, the real-time detection of such content
Although some progress has been made for English hate speech
detection, however, most of the research has primarily focused on
detecting abusive and offensive language, or only one specific type of
hate speech, as discussed in the related work section. This subject still
appears to be at a very early stage of research for the Arabic dialects. To
the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to detect four
types of Arabic hate speech, such as gender-based and nationality-based.
Furthermore, all of the existing corpora of Arabic offensive or hate
speech-language are multi-dialect, which means they contain texts of
different Arabic dialects, such as the modern standard Arabic, Gulf,
Egypt, and Levantine. The mixed language may negatively affect the
ability of the annotators, especially if they are native speakers of only
one of the dialects. This drawback is observed in most of the past studies,
especially when annotators are selected via crowdsourcing.
1.2. Contributions
To overcome the weaknesses of previous studies, we have devised an
effective detection approach of hate and offensive speech. Hereafter, we
highlight our main contributions:

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: sba166@uregina.ca (S. Alsafari).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.osnem.2020.100096
Received 21 March 2020; Received in revised form 22 June 2020; Accepted 18 August 2020
Available online 16 September 2020
2468-6964/© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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