Detecting Hate Speech using Deep Learning Techniques

Social networking sites saw a steep rise in terms of number of users in last few years. As a result of this, the interaction among the users also increased considerably. Along with these posting racial comments based on cast, race, gender, religion, etc. also increased. This propagation of negative messages is collectively known as hate speeches. Often these posts containing negative comments in social networking sites create law and order situations in the society, leading to loss of human life and properties. Detecting hate speech is one of the major challenges faced in recent time. In recent past, there have been a considerable amount of research going on the field of detection of hate speech in the social networking sites. Researchers in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning have done considerable amount research in in this area. This paper uses a simple up sampling method to make the data balanced and implements deep learning models like Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) for improved accuracy in detecting hate speech in social networking sites. LSTM was found to have better accuracy that Bi-LSTM for the data set considered. LSTM also had better values for precision and F1 score. Bi-LSTM only for higher values for recall.