Identifying Aggression and Toxicity in Comments using Capsule Network

Saurabh Srivastava, Prerna Khurana, Vartika Tewari


Abstract
Aggression and related activities like trolling, hate speech etc. involve toxic comments in various forms. These are common scenarios in today’s time and websites react by shutting down their comment sections. To tackle this, an algorithmic solution is preferred to human moderation which is slow and expensive. In this paper, we propose a single model capsule network with focal loss to achieve this task which is suitable for production environment. Our model achieves competitive results over other strong baseline methods, which show its effectiveness and that focal loss exhibits significant improvement in such cases where class imbalance is a regular issue. Additionally, we show that the problem of extensive data preprocessing, data augmentation can be tackled by capsule networks implicitly. We achieve an overall ROC AUC of 98.46 on Kaggle-toxic comment dataset and show that it beats other architectures by a good margin. As comments tend to be written in more than one language, and transliteration is a common problem, we further show that our model handles this effectively by applying our model on TRAC shared task dataset which contains comments in code-mixed Hindi-English.
Anthology ID:
W18-4412
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC-2018)
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Ritesh Kumar, Atul Kr. Ojha, Marcos Zampieri, Shervin Malmasi
Venue:
TRAC
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
98–105
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4412
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Saurabh Srivastava, Prerna Khurana, and Vartika Tewari. 2018. Identifying Aggression and Toxicity in Comments using Capsule Network. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC-2018), pages 98–105, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying Aggression and Toxicity in Comments using Capsule Network (Srivastava et al., TRAC 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4412.pdf