Automatic Detection of Cyberbullying On Social Networks Based On Bullying Features
Automatic Detection of Cyberbullying On Social Networks Based On Bullying Features
ABSTRACT these platforms are also places where users experience bully-
With the increasing use of social media, cyberbullying be- ing as victims, bullies or bystanders. One study conducted
haviour has received more and more attention. Cyberbul- by national anti-bullying charity Ditch the Label in 2013,
lying may cause many serious and negative impacts on a has shown that two out of three 13-22 years old who were
person’s life and even lead to teen suicide. To reduce and surveyed have been victims of cyberbullying.1 As reported
stop cyberbullying, one effective solution is to automatically in [18], approximately 43% of teens once reported being bul-
detect bullying content based on appropriate machine learn- lied through social media. Another study also shows that
ing and natural language processing techniques. However, cyberbullying victimization rate ranges from 10% to 40%
many existing approaches in the literature are just normal [9].
text classification models without considering bullying char- Different from physical bullying, cyberbullying is ”behind-
acteristics. In this paper, we propose a representation learn- the-scenes” and ”24/7”. Even worse, the bullying messages
ing framework specific to cyberbullying detection. Based on left on the Internet will not vanish over time but contin-
word embeddings, we expand a list of pre-defined insulting uously bother other users. Therefore, the consequences of
words and assign different weights to obtain bullying fea- cyberbullying are even more far-rearching and severe than
tures, which are then concatenated with Bag-of-Words and those of physical bullying.
latent semantic features to form the final representation be- To detect cyberbullying content underlying huge volumes
fore feeding them into a linear SVM classifier. Experimental of posts on social media, a good solution is to develop ma-
study on a twitter dataset is conducted, and our method is chine learning-based automatic cyberbullying detection sys-
compared with several baseline text representation learning tem to categorize the information and generate reports if
models and cyberbullying detection methods. The superior any cyberbullying is detected, so that all the sensitive in-
performance achieved by our method has been observed in formation would be modified or erased at the first time,
this study. preventing Internet users from overexposure to undesirable
information. Natural Language Processing and Text Mining
techniques are commonly used in this solution. The frame-
CCS Concepts work of machine learning-based automatic cyberbullying de-
•Information systems → Data mining; tection includes two parts: Representation Learning for In-
ternet Messages and Classification. Each Internet message
Keywords is firstly transformed into a fixed-length vector and the clas-
sifier can be trained in the training corpus over the learned
Cyberbullying Detection, Text Mining, Representation Learn- feature space. Finally, the trained classifier can detect the
ing, Bag-of-Words, Word Embeddings existence of cyberbullying content in each new Internet Mes-
sage. Similar to other text categorization tasks, the core and
1. INTRODUCTION vital step is the first step: numerical representation learning.
The Internet technology has made a great impact on the In this field, many previous approaches utilize Bag-of-Words
communication and relationship among people. In partic- (BoW) model to represent text. BoW model is a classical
ular, social media platforms now gain their popularity for model in which document is regarded as a multi-set of the
people of a wide range of ages. Social media provides users words contained in it and modeled as a vector whose weights
not only a good platform for communication and informa- indicate the occurrence of words in the document. One ma-
tion sharing, but also an easy access to fresh news. However, jor limitation of BoW is that each feature corresponding to a
term is assumed to be independent to each other and fail to
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or
capture semantic information. Feature extraction is always
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed conducted over the BoW features [19]. Besides BoW model,
for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full cita- word embeddings, as one exciting fruit of deep learning in
tion on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than NLP community, are able to capture semantic information
ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or re-
publish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission behind words. In word embeddings, similar words are close
and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. to each other, the cosine similarity between word embed-
ICDCN ’16, January 04-07, 2016, Singapore, Singapore
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c 2016 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4032-8/16/01. . . $15.00 http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/433733/
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2833312.2849567 69-of-youth-face-cyberbullying
dings reflect the semantic similarity between two words.
In cyberbullying detection, some bullying messages always
contain insulting or curse words, which can be regarded as
Final Representation
discriminative features. This semantic information can be
utilized to provide a robust text representation. Some pre-
vious efforts have been made to use these bullying words. Di-
nakar et.al utilized Linear Discriminative Analysis to learn
label specific features [4], which can be regarded as artificial Bag-of-words Latent Semantic Bullying
bullying words. In addition, based on prior knowledge, Na- Features Features Features
har et.al collected a list of bullying-like words and proposed
a weighted TF-IDF scheme by scaling these corresponding
bullying-like features with a factor of two [14]. Different
from a simple utilization of bullying terms in these previous Figure 1: Illustration of final representation in our
approaches, our work provides an elaborated use of bullying proposed EBoW model.
terms based on word embeddings.
In this paper, we proposed a new representation learning
method for cyberbullying detection named embeddings en- and combine them with BoW features to train a classifier
hanced Bag-of-Words model (EBoW). In EBoW, we firstly [4]. The length of label-specific features is limited to be
define a list of insulting words based on expert knowledge less than the class numbers, which hinders the performance
and linguistic resources, i.e., insulting seeds. Then, based on boost. Nahar et.al magnified the weights corresponding to
word embeddings, we extend insulting seeds to define bul- bullying words by two times [14]. This work shares a simi-
lying features. Different weights are assigned to bullying lar motivation with the construction of bullying features in
features based on the cosine similarity between word em- our model that bullying features should be enhanced. How-
beddings. Considering insulting seeds are expanded through ever, they did not consider the words’ semantics and the
word embeddings, the construction of insulting seeds do not scaling operation was quite arbitrary. In addition, Nahar
require much manual labor, which will be illustrated in the et.al [15] also adopted topic models including Probabilis-
section 3.3. Finally, we concatenate the learned bullying tic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) and Latent Dirichlet
features with Bag-of-Words features and Latent semantic Allocation (LDA) to learn topics and performed feature se-
features to form the vector representation. lection, which is conducted over topics that feature under
This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we firstly bullying-like topics are preserved. However, the determina-
introduce some related work. Then, we present our proposed tion of bullying-like topics lacks a general theoretical basis.
Embedding-enhanced BoW (EBoW) model as a representa- 2.2 Word2vec Embeddings
tion learning method for cyberbullying detection in Section
3. In Section 4, experimental results on a real twitter corpus Recently, Google introduced word2vec, which is an effec-
are illustrated and analyzed. Finally, concluding remarks tive and efficient word-embeddings tool [12, 13]. Based on a
are provided in Section 5. two-layer neural network language model, word2vec learns
vector representations for each word. The tool actually in-
cludes two separated models: Continuous Bag of Words
2. RELATED WORK (CBoW) and Skip-gram. The training goals of these two
Since our work adopts word2vec embeddings to learn rep- methods are reverse. CBoW tries to predict a word given
resentation for cyberbullying detection, we briefly review the surrounding words, while Skip-gram tries to predict a
some previous works in cyberbullying detection and word2vec window of words given a single word. Due to its surpris-
embeddings. ingly efficient architecture and unsupervised training proto-
col, word2vec can be trained over a large-scale unannotated
2.1 Cyberbullying Detection corpus with limited computational resources. The meaning-
The booming of social network leads to the extensive spread ful linguistic relationships between words can be encoded
of cyberbullying, which is a quite severe problem for children into learned word2vec embeddings.
and teenagers. Traditional studies of cyberbullying stand
more on a macroscopic view. Conducted by social scientists 3. EMBEDDINGS-ENHANCED
and psychologists, those studies focus on the statistics of cy-
berbullying and how to prevent them in a psychological way BAG-OF-WORDS MODEL
[11, 6, 8, 5]. As big social network service providers all offer In this section, we present our proposed representation
open APIs for academic research, instead of doing statisti- learning method for cyberbullying detection. The final rep-
cal study on limited sampled data, researchers are able to resentation consists of three parts including Bag-of-Words
access to much larger corpus by using data crawling, which features, latent semantic features and bullying features based
further drives the development of the computational study on word embeddings, as shown in Figure 1. These three
of cyberbullying based on machine learning and natural lan- kinds of features are presented as follows, in particular, the
guage processing techniques. One introductory work has details of bullying features generation.
been presented in [17], in which several NLP models such as
BoW, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet 3.1 Bag-of-Words Features
Allocation (LDA) are applied to detect bullying signals in To extract Bag-of-Words features, a vocabulary including
social media. Their results have verified the possibility of unigram and bigram is constructed firstly and the terms
automatic cyberbullying detection. Dinakar et.al used Lin- whose document frequencies are less than 2 are all ignored.
ear Discriminative Analysis to learn label specific features Different term weighting schemes including tf-idf and binary
ones can be applied here [3, 16]. In this paper, we adopt the
tf-idf weighting scheme. The tf-idf weight corresponding to
the i-th word in j-th document is calculated as follows:
N
wi,j = T Fi,j × log( ) (1)
DFi
where T Fi,j is the term frequency of the i-th word in j-th
document, DFi is the number of documents containing i-th
word and N is the number of documents.
Scores (%)
78