applied

sciences
Article
An Explainable Artificial Intelligence Model for Detecting
Xenophobic Tweets
Gabriel Ichcanziho Pérez-Landa 1 , Octavio Loyola-González 2, * and Miguel Angel Medina-Pérez 1,2

1 School of Science and Engineering, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Carretera al Lago de Guadalupe Km. 3.5,
Atizapán 52926, Mexico; [email protected] (G.I.P.-L.); [email protected] (M.A.M.-P.)
2 Altair Management Consultants, Calle de José Ortega y Gasset 22-24, 5th Floor, 28006 Madrid, Spain
* Correspondence: [email protected]

Abstract: Xenophobia is a social and political behavior that has been present in our societies since
the beginning of humanity. The feeling of hatred, fear, or resentment is present before people from
different communities from ours. With the rise of social networks like Twitter, hate speeches were
swift because of the pseudo feeling of anonymity that these platforms provide. Sometimes this
violent behavior on social networks that begins as threats or insults to third parties breaks the
Internet barriers to become an act of real physical violence. Hence, this proposal aims to correctly
classify xenophobic posts on social networks, specifically on Twitter. In addition, we collected a
xenophobic tweets database from which we also extracted new features by using a Natural Language
Processing (NLP) approach. Then, we provide an Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) model,



allowing us to understand better why a post is considered xenophobic. Consequently, we provide a


set of contrast patterns describing xenophobic tweets, which could help decision-makers prevent acts
Citation: Pérez-Landa, G.I.; of violence caused by xenophobic posts on Twitter. Finally, our interpretable results based on our
Loyola-González, O.; Medina-Pérez, new feature representation approach jointly with a contrast pattern-based classifier obtain similar
M.A. An Explainable Artificial classification results than other feature representations jointly with prominent machine learning
Intelligence Model for Detecting classifiers, which are not easy to understand by an expert in the application area.
Xenophobic Tweets. Appl. Sci. 2021,
11, 10801. https://doi.org/10.3390/
Keywords: Xenophobia; Twitter; Explainable Artificial Intelligence
app112210801

Academic Editors: María Paz

Sesmero Lorente, Plamen Angelov
1. Introduction
and Jose Antonio Iglesias Martinez
Xenophobia has been a social behavior present in people since the beginning of
Received: 23 September 2021 humanity. Fear and rejection of the different have led many people to distrust, belittle,
Accepted: 27 October 2021 and even hate other people who belong to a different social environment [1]. For example,
Published: 16 November 2021 recently, the uncertainty and lack of information about COVID-19 have generated acts of
Xenophobia toward people of Chinese origin [2]. These xenophobic acts are more intense
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral using social networks because people can show this discriminatory act non-physical, even
with regard to jurisdictional claims in with fake profiles or using bots [3,4].
published maps and institutional affil- As of March 2021, 5.1 billion people have access to the Internet, representing 65.6%
iations. of the world’s population [5]. With the growth of the Internet, many social networks
were created, which provide a virtual space for people to communicate through them by
sharing posts, pictures, and videos [6]. Some of the most popular social networks today
are Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, among others [7].
Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. With the spread of social networks for interacting on the Internet, and the use of fake
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. profiles, hate posts towards other peoples have been increasing as social media expands.
This article is an open access article Consequently, these posts cause not only the use of offensive language but even lead to
distributed under the terms and acts of physical violence [8]. Increasingly, social media plays an essential role in amplifying
conditions of the Creative Commons and accelerating violence in the real world. The violent behavior present in social networks
Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// such as Twitter, Facebook, among others, has considerably increased the probability of
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ committing acts of violence in the real world, which can be fatal [9].
4.0/).

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801. https://doi.org/10.3390/app112210801 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 2 of 27

The next examples of violence preceded by comments on social networks were ex-
tracted from Citizens Crime Commission of New York City [9]:
• SUMMARY {Date: 23 July 2017, Place: Nashville, TN, USA, Platform: Facebook}:
“A 20-year-old man and their 37-year-old mother were shot and killed in their home hours after
the 20-year-old posted on Facebook multiple photos of himself with large wads of cash, jewelry,
and shopping bags.”
• SUMMARY {Date: 6 October 2016, Place: St. Louis, MO, USA, Platform: Twitter}:
“An 18-year-old man fatally shot a 33-year-old police officer who was responding to a distur-
bance call. The shooter had repeatedly threatened violence on their Twitter page for months
before the shooting.”
With the aim of stopping the hatred, racism, and Xenophobia present on the Internet,
many web pages have rules for their users that prohibit these types of behavior. However,
a post with violent content is visible until it is detected as brutal by some administrator
user or a system that does not work in real-time, creating a wave of violence. In contrast,
it is still posted [4]. Facebook has announced that there is no place for hate speech on
their social network, and they would battle against racism and Xenophobia. However, the
solution proposed by Facebook and Twitter indicates that the problem depends on human
effort, leaving the users the responsibility of reporting offensive comments [10].
According to Pitsilis et al. [11], detecting offensive posts requires a great deal of work
for human annotators, but this is a subjective task providing personal interpretation and
bias. As Nobata et al. [12] mentioned, the need to automate the detection of abusive
posts becomes very important due to the growth of communication among people on
the Internet.
Each social network has its privacy policy, which could or could not allow developers
to analyze the publications that users make on their platforms. For example, Facebook does
not recognize the extraction of comments from publications, except that these comments are
from a page that you manage [13]. Although there are pages such as export comments [14]
that allow this information to be obtained. However, Facebook only allows downloading
publications with less than 485 comments for a price of USD 11. On the one hand, Twitter
natively has an API that enables developers to download their users’ publications through
Twitter Streaming API, and Twitter REST API [15].
Twitter is a social network characterized by the briefness of the posts, with a maximum
of 280 characters. In the first quarter of 2019, Twitter reported 330 million users and 500
million tweets per day [16]. In the United States, Twitter is a powerful communication tool
for politicians since it allows them to express their position and share their thoughts with
many of the country’s population. This opinion can dramatically change citizens’ behavior,
even if it was only written on Twitter [17]. Based on what was said previously, an open
problem is detecting xenophobic tweets by using an automated Machine Learning model
that allows experts to understand why the tweet has been classified as xenophobic.
Hence, this research focuses on developing an Explainable Artificial Intelligence model
(XAI) for detecting xenophobic tweets. The main contribution of this research is to provide
an XAI model in a language close to experts in the application area, such as psychologists,
sociologists, and linguists. Consequently, this model can be used to analyze and predict
the xenophobic behavior of users in social networks.
As a part of this research, we have created a Twitter database in collaboration with
experts in international relations, sociology, and psychology. The experts have helped us to
classify xenophobic posts in our Twitter database proposal. Then, based on this database,
we have extracted new features using Natural Language Processing (NLP), jointly with
the XAI approach, creating a robust and understanding model for experts in the field of
Xenophobia classification, particularly experts in international relations.
This document is structured as follows: Section 2 provides preliminaries about Xeno-
phobia and contrast pattern-based classification. Section 3 shows a summary of works
related to Xenophobia and hate-speech classification. Section 4 introduces our approach for
Xenophobia detection in Twitter. Section 5 describes our experimental setup. Section 6 con-
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 3 of 27

tains our experimental results as well as a brief discussion of the results. Finally, Section 7
presents the conclusions and future work.

2. Preliminaries
2.1. Xenophobia
According to Wicker [18], Xenophobia is a hostile response that society has towards
foreign people, providing stereotypes and prejudices against these unfamiliar people.
Usually, this aggressive response has political or individual purposes, which seek to
improve society’s cohesion through discrimination of foreign people. This xenophobic
response can become so strong as to be a distinctive feature of a population. Additionally,
Wicker mentions that the fear and hatred with which Xenophobia is fostered are qualities
based on subjective experiences, which have a background in the education and values
that we receive by society. In this way, Xenophobia, being a hostile response, can also be
considered as social behavior, which can be used to control communities, in which hatred
of the other forms a way not only to generate identity but to promote acts of violence before
third parties [19].
For Crush [20], Xenophobia proceeds through dynamic public rhetoric, which shows
contempt through verbal offenses or acts of violence. Xenophobia actively stigmatizes
immigrants, calling them “threats” to society, and thus making them “the cause of social prob-
lems.”
It is essential to understand what are the differences between racism and Xenophobia.
However, these phenomena are often intertwined, they can also present themselves in
other ways, and each one of them entails different societal problems. Therefore, the means
to solve and correct these social behaviors are different. On the one hand, racism implies
discrimination against human beings based on their physical characteristics, such as skin
tone, weight, height, and facial features, among others. On the other hand, Xenophobia
denotes “behavior specifically based on the perception that the other is alien or originates from
outside the community or nation” [21].
Some of the definitions of Xenophobia were presented at the international conference
in Migration, Racism, Discrimination, and Xenophobia [21]:
• By the standard dictionary definition: Xenophobia is the intense dislike or fear of
strangers or people from other countries.
• As a sociologist’s point of view: Xenophobia is an attitudinal orientation of hostility
against non-natives in a given population.
• From world conference against racism: Xenophobia describes attitudes, prejudices,
and behavior that reject, exclude, and often vilify persons, based on the perception
that they are outsiders or foreigners to the community, society, or national identity.
Xenophobia has managed to stay on social networks, which it has spread quickly. The
number of discourses of violence that motivate discrimination or violence against immi-
grants as well as minority groups has grown enormously [22]. Due to this growth, experts
have questioned states and social media companies on stopping this spread. Consequently,
these online and offline hate speeches have increased social tension, leading to violent
attacks that can end in death [23]. For these reasons and more than ever, social networks
must take action to mitigate this behavior on their platforms and reduce the probability
that people will be injured in the real world [24].
One problem that exists is how to know when a comment is xenophobic? According
to Bucio [25], in Mexico, posts with hate hashtags are daily published, among which are:
#indio, #puto, #naco, among others. The posts with hate hashtags cause various social
problems such as classism, homophobia, racism, sexism, Xenophobia, etc. [25]. The most
alarming thing about this xenophobic behavior on social networks is that public figures
write some of these xenophobic comments. Additionally, Bucio mentioned that public
figures are not penalized because their xenophobic posts are treated as “black humor or
harmless comments”; allowing several people to spread hate speeches hidden in “humor”
publications. They are also trying to lessen the fact that they are normalizing xenophobic
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 4 of 27

behaviors. As they are “humor”, the people who write these posts do not contemplate
the consequences that their comments may have on people’s lives, such as sadness, pain,
distress, humiliation, isolation, and dignitary insult [26].
The problem of writing xenophobic posts is that we are unaware of how dangerous our
behavior can be on social networks. At the time when we started to spread publications that
incite discrimination, that promote hatred and violence towards others, we are complicit
in the consequences that these may have [27]. Threats, insults, blows, even attacks that
end in the death of third parties are caused day by day as a result of the normalization of
xenophobic behavior on social networks [28].
Social networks are aware of xenophobic behavior; however, there are still no quick
and precise measures to address this issue with the importance it needs. The lack of an
automatic xenophobic publication detection tool makes them last longer online and can
harm third parties while they are not deleted. There are even cases where “after deleting
offensive posts”, they tend to reappear after a while [4].
Finally, the classification of xenophobic comments on social networks is very re-
cent [29–31]. According to Plaza-Del-Arco et al. [32], the rating of xenophobic posts is a
poorly addressed topic. Besides, Loyola-González [33] mentions that there is currently a
trend to transform unexplainable models (black-box) to explainable models (white-box),
particularly in sectors such as health care. Hence, our proposal aims to classify xenophobic
posts through an Explainable Artificial Intelligence model. With the use of XAI models, in
such wat that experts can have a set of explainable patterns describing xenophobic posts.

2.2. Contrast Pattern-Based Classification

Nowadays, using Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) models instead of the highly
used black-box artificial intelligence models is a trend, especially for most important areas,
for example, criminal justice, healthcare, finance, among others [34]. The main advantages
of using XAI models are that they can achieve reasonable classifications results and provide
an explication of the model in a language close to the experts in the related work [35].
The contrast pattern-based classifiers are a group of algorithms that follows the
XAI approach [36]. These classifiers can provide similar classification results as other
well-known classification models, such as Nearest Neighbor, Naïve–Bayes bagging, De-
cision Trees, boosting, and even support vector machines [37]. Additionally, according
to Loyola-González [36], contrast pattern-based classifiers can be used to deal with class
imbalance problems.
A pattern is an expression characterized in a particular language that portrays a
collection of objects. In contrast, a contrast pattern is a pattern that frequently appears in a
class and at the same time infrequently in the remaining courses [37]. Ordinarily, a pattern
is represented by a conjunction of relational statements, each with the form:
[fi # vj ], where vj is a value within the space of feature fi , and # is a relational operator taken
from the set { =, 6=, ≤, >, ∈, ∈ /, } [33,36,38]. For example, [violent foreigners = “present”] ∧
[hate-speech ≥ 0.11], is a pattern describing post xenophobes.
Thereby, a contrast pattern-based classifier uses a group of patterns to construct a
model capable of classifying query objects into a class [37]. Nowadays, there exist pattern-
based classifiers such as: OCSVM [39], HeDEx [40], CAEP [37], iCAEP [41], PBC4cip [36],
PCB4occ [42], and PBCEQ [43] from which PBC4cip and PBCEQ have shown to obtain the
best results for class imbalance problems [43].
To build a contrast pattern-based classifier, there exist three main steps: Mining,
filtering, and finally, the classification step [36]. Mining is committed to discovering
a set of conceivable patterns by an exploratory examination employing a search-space,
characterized by many inductive limitations provided by the user. Filtering is committed
to choosing a set of high-quality patterns coming from the mining step. Classification is
responsible for looking at the leading procedure for combining the data given by a subset
of patterns and builds a precise model based on patterns [3].
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 5 of 27

For mining the contrast patterns, it is required to construct a Decision Tree (DT). A DT
contains components of the tree structure based on the graph theory. Then, a DT can be
reported as a directed graph where two vertices are associated by only one path [44]. The
top-down approach is the most used method to make an inducing decision tree [33]. This
approach is based on the divide and conquer method [45]. It begins by making a node at
the root with all the objects of the training database D, and after, it splits the root node into
two disjoint subsets, the left child Dl and the right child Dr ; this process is performed again
recursively until a halt criterion is reached [46].
According to Loyola-González [33], the extraction of contrast patterns obtained from
only one decision tree generates very few contrast patterns. Nevertheless, the pattern’s
extraction from several equal decision trees causes several duplicate patterns. To deal
with this problem, collecting diverse decision trees for extracting the contrast patterns can
mitigate this problem [47]. Each pattern is the conjunction of the properties fi # vj in a
path from the root node to a leaf node; that is, any path from the root to a leaf decides
the conjunction of properties, making a pattern. Finally, only those patterns satisfying
the contrast pattern condition are kept [3]. For example, Figure 1 shows an example of a
hypothetic decision tree for Xenophobia classification.

Hate-speech
Hate-speech ≤ 0.20 Hate-speech > 0.20

Positive Violent Foreigners

Positive < 0.53 Positive ≥ 0.53 V. Foreigners = Present V. Foreigners ≠ Present

Foreigners Non-Xenophobic Xenophobic Angry

Foreigners ≠ Present Foreigners = Present Angry ≤ 0.20 Angry > 0.20

Non-Xenophobic Xenophobic Non-Xenophobic Xenophobic

Figure 1. Decision Tree example.

From this decision tree, we can extract the following six contrast patterns:
• P1 = [Hate-speech ≤ 0.20] ∧ [Positive < 0.53] ∧ [Foreigners 6= “Present”]
• P2 = [Hate-speech ≤ 0.20] ∧ [Positive < 0.53] ∧ [Foreigners = “Present”]
• P3 = [Hate-speech ≤ 0.20] ∧ [Positive ≥ 0.53]
• P4 = [Hate-speech > 0.20] ∧ [Violent Foreigners = “Present”]
• P5 = [Hate-speech > 0.20] ∧ [Violent Foreigners 6= “Present”] ∧ [Angry ≤ 0.20]
• P6 = [Hate-speech > 0.20] ∧ [Violent Foreigners 6= “Present”] ∧ [Angry > 0.20]
from which P1 , P3 , P5 corresponds to the Non-Xenophobia class and the remaining
patterns (P2 , P4 , P6 ) corresponds to the Xenophobia class.
For filtering the contrast patterns, there exist two main approaches, based on set
theory (i) and quality measures (ii) [33]. The first approach removes duplicate and specific
patterns and also removes redundant items. The second approach allows generating a
pattern ranking in which the raking position is based on the discriminative power of the
patterns. It can be explained the three main steps of the contrast pattern filtering process
based on the set theory as follows:
• Removing duplicated contrast patterns: when two or more contrast patterns have
the same items and cover the same objects, they are colled duplicate patterns. This
problem usually happens because the contrast patterns come from several decision
trees built from the same training database. Then, all the duplicated contrast patterns
are removed to reduce the contrast patterns, and only one is kept.
• Removing specific contrast patterns: commonly, some specific patterns are extracted
in the mining process. Let us suppose that there are two contrast patterns P1 and
P2 , that belong to the same class. The pattern P2 is considered more specific than
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 6 of 27

P1 if all the items contained in P1 are also in P2 but not vice versa. For example, let
P1 = [Hate-speech ≤ 0.20] ∧ [Positive ≥ 0.53] and P2 = [Hate-speech ≤ 0.20] ∧ [Positive
≥ 0.53]∧ [Negative < 0.24]. Since all the items presented in P1 are also in P2 , but P2
has one more item, then P2 is considered more specific than P1 . Therefore, according
to [48], P2 should be removed.
• Removing redundant items: An item I1 is more general than another item I2 if all of
the objects presented in I1 are also in 2 , but not the other way around. We also say that
I2 is redundant with I1 . If two items in a pattern are redundant, the most general item
is eliminated [3]. We can provide the next example of a pattern with redundant items:
[Hate-speech > 0.20] ∧ [Hate-speech > 0.41], which is simplified to [Hate-speech > 0.41]
because an entry with a hate-speech greater than 0.41 is also greater than 0.20.
To explain the second approach of filtering the contrast pattern based on quality
measures, let us take the support as our quality measure. Let p be a pattern, and C =
{C1 ,C2 ,C3 , . . . ,Cn } a set of classes such that C1 ∪ C2 ∪ C3 ∪ . . . ∪ Cn = U; then, support
for p is obtained after dividing the number of objects that belong to Ci that were described
by p by the total number of objects that are in Ci [36]. After obtaining all the supports for
each contrast pattern, they can be ranked from higher to lower support. Then, it can be
selected only the first n patterns and remove the rest of the patterns [38]. Additionally, a
minimum threshold can be proposed for considering a pattern with enough quality and
then eliminate all those patterns that do not reach the minimum threshold.
There are two main strategies for classifying the contrast patterns: unweighted (i) and
weighted (ii) scores. The unweighted strategy is easy to compute and understand but is
not suitable for all kinds of problems, such as class imbalance problems because it tends to
be biased towards the majority class [36]. The weighted approach is more computationally
expensive but is ideal for handling both balance and imbalance problems [33]. Specifically,
for our Xenophobia detection problem on social networks, we have an imbalanced database.
In this way, we decided to use PBC4cip [36] as our contrast pattern-based classifier, not only
because it has been proved to obtain the best classification results jointly with PBCQE [43]
for class imbalance problems, but also because PBC4Cip provides significantly fewer
patterns than others contrast pattern-based classifiers [36]. PBC4cip weights the sum of
supports in each class at the training stage by considering all contrast patterns covering a
query object and class imbalance level. This preparing plan is distinctive from conventional
classifiers, which only sum the supports [3].
The contrast pattern-based classifiers have been used to solve real-world problems,
where they have managed to obtain similar or best results to other classifiers. It can be
mentioned some of the most relevant applications where contrast pattern-based classifiers
have been applied, such as improvement of road safety [49], rule construction from crime
pattern [50], the discovery of an unusual rule within a cerebrovascular examination [51],
describing political figures [52], the observation of sales trends in dynamic markets [53],
bot detection on Twitter [3], bot detection on Web Log Files [54], detection of alarm pat-
terns in industrial alarm floods [55], complex activity recognition in smart homes [56],
discriminating deviant behaviors in MOBA games [57], summarizing significant changes
in network traffic [58], among others.

3. Related Work
In this section, we present previous works related to our research. All these works
have similar semantics since their objective is to identify undesirable behaviors in social
networks using Machine Learning.
Pitropakis [59] addressed the issue of Xenophobia classification on Twitter. For that,
they created a Xenophobia database on Twitter using keywords associated with Xenopho-
bia. Additionally, they used a geolocation filter to focus on the UK, USA, and Canada
countries. Their database consisted of labeling 6085 tweets, of which 3971 belong to the
Non-Xenophobia class and 2114 to the Xenophobia class. Finally, to classify the tweets, they
used Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) [60] as their feature extraction
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 7 of 27

method, and they also used word n-grams of length one to three and character n-grams
of size one to four to create their tokens. They used Support Vector Machines (SVM) [61],
Naïve–Bayes (NB) [62], and Logistic Regression (LR) [63] as their classifier models. They
obtained 0.84 in the F1 score test, 0.87 in the recall, and 0.85 in precision.
Plaza-Del-Arco et al. [32] compared three different approaches to deal with Spanish
hate speech on social networks. The first approach used supervised machine learning
classifiers, while the second used deep learning techniques, and the last was performed
using lexicon-based techniques. The problems addressed in their investigation were
misogyny and Xenophobia classification in Twitter. To accomplish that, Plaza-Del-Arco et al.
use a supervised machine learning approach using the Term Frequency–Inverse Document
Frequency [60] jointly with the Naïve–Bayes [62], SupportVector Machines [61], Logistic
Regression [63], Decision Tree, and Ensemble Voting (EV) machine learning classifiers.
Furthermore, the FastText word embedding jointly with Recurrent Neural Networks
(RNN) [64] and Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) [65] were used. Finally, the last approach
used was to build an emotion lexicon dictionary made of words related to misogyny and
Xenophobia. Finally, using the supervised machine learning approach, they obtained their
best results 0.754 in the accuracy, 0.747 in precision, 0.739 in the recall, and 0.742 in the
F1 score test. These results were obtained by using the Ensemble Voting classifier with
unigrams and bigrams.
Charitidis et al. [66] proposed an ensemble of classifiers for the classification of tweets
that threaten the integrity of journalists. They brought together a group of specialists to
define which posts had a violent intention against journalists. Something worth noting is
that they used five different Machine Learning models among which are: Convolutional
Neural Network (CNN) [67], Skipped CNN (sCNN) [68], CNN+Gated Recurrent Unit
(CNN+GRU) [69], Long-Short-Term Memory [65], and LSTM+Attention (aLSTM) [70].
Charitidis et al. used those models to create an ensemble and tested their architecture
in different languages obtaining an F1 Score result of 0.71 for the German language and
0.87 for the Greek language. Finally, with the use of Recurrent Neural Networks [64] and
Convolutional Neural Networks [67], they extracted essential features such as the word or
character combinations and the word or character dependencies in sequences of words.
Pitsilis et al. [11] used Long-Short-Term Memory [65] classifiers to detect racist and
sexist posts issued short posts, such as those found on the social network Twitter. Their
innovation was to use a deep learning architecture using Word Frequency Vectorization
(WFV) [11]. Finally, they obtained a precision of 0.71 for classifying racist posts and 0.76
for sexist posts. To train the proposed model, they collected a database of 16,000 tweets
labeled as neutral, sexist, or racist.
Sahay et al. [71] proposed a model using NLP and Machine Learning techniques
to identify comments of cyberbullying and abusive posts in social media and online
communities. They proposed to use four classifiers: Logistic Regression [63], Support
Vector Machines [61], Random Forest (RF) (RF, and Gradient Boosting Machine (GB) [72].
They concluded that SVM and gradient boosting machines trained on the feature stack
performed better than logistic regression and random forest classifiers. Additionally, Sahay
et al. used Count Vector Features (CVF) [71] and Term Frequency-Inverse Document
Frequency [60] features.
Nobata et al. [12] focused on the classification of abusive posts as neutral or harmful,
for which they collected two databases, both of which were obtained from Yahoo!. They
used the Vowpal Wabbit regression model [73] that uses the following Natural Language
Processing features: N-grams, Linguistic, Syntactic and Distributional Semantics (LS, SS,
DS). By combining all of them, they obtained a performance of 0.783 in the F1-score test
and 0.9055 AUC.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 8 of 27

It is essential to highlight that all the investigations above collected their database;
therefore, they are not comparable. A summary of the publications mentioned above can
be seen in Table 1. The previously related works seek the classification of hate posts on
social networks through Machine Learning models. These investigations have relatively
similar results that range between 0.71 and 0.88 in the F1-Score test.
Beyond the performance that these classifiers can have, the problem of using black-box
models is that we cannot be sure what factors determine whether a message is abusive.
Today we need to understand the background of the behavior of ML models to make better
decisions [33,74]. This is why this work takes on the characteristics of previous works but
proposes a radical change in its intelligibility, offering experts in the field the possibility of
having a transparent tool that helps them classify xenophobic posts and understand why
these posts are considered in this way.

Table 1. Summary of previous work in terms of the problem they address, the data source used,
features extracted, classifiers used, evaluation metrics, and the result obtained in the evaluation.

Database Evaluation
Author Problem Extracted Features Methods Performance
Origin Metrics
• Word n-grams • LR • F1 • 0.84 F1
Pitropakis et al. • Xenophobia • Twitter • Char n-grams • SVM • Rec • 0.87 Rec
• TF-IDF • NB • Prec • 0.85 Prec
• LR
• SVM • F1 • 0.742 F1
• TF-IDF
• Misogyny and • NB • Rec • 0.739 Rec
Plaza-Del-Arco et al. • Twitter • FastText
Xenophobia • Vote • Prec • 0.747 Prec
• Emotion lexicon
• DT • Acc • 0.754 Acc
• LSTM
• CNN
• Word or character • English: 0.82
• Wikipedia • sCNN
combinations • German: 0.71
• Hate speech to • Twitter • CNN
Charitidis et al. • Word or character • F1 • Spanish: 0.72
journalists • Facebook + GRU
dependencies in • Fr:ench 0.84
• Other • LSTM
sequences of words • Greek: 0.87
• aLSTM
• Sexism • Word Frequency • LSTM • Sexism: 0.76
Pitsilis et al. • Twitter • F1
• Racism Vectorization • RNN • Racism 0.71
• Train: Twitter • Count Vector • LR
• AUC • 0.779 AUC
Sahay et al. • Cyberbullying and YouTube Features • SVM
• Acc • 0.974 Acc
• Test: Kaggle • TF-IDF • RF
• N-grams
• Yahoo! • Linguistic semantics • Vowpal
• Abusive • F1 • 0.783 F1
Nobata et al. Finance • Syntactic semantics Wabbit’s
language • AUC • 0.906 AUC
and News • Distributional regression
semantics

4. Our Approach for Detecting Xenophobic Tweets

Our approach for Xenophobia detection in social networks consists of three steps:
the Xenophobia database creation labeled by experts (Section 4.1); creating a new feature
representation based on a combination of sentiments, emotions, intentions, relevant words,
and syntactic features stemming from tweets (Section 4.2); and providing both contrast
patterns describing Xenophobia texts and an explainable model for classifying Xenophobia
posts (Section 4.3).

4.1. Creating the Xenophobia Database

For collecting our xenophobic database, we used the Twitter API [15] using the Tweepy
Python library [75] implementation to filter the tweets by language, location, and keywords.
The Twitter API offers free access to all Twitter data that the users generate, not only the
text of the tweets that each user posts on Twitter, but also the user’s information such as
the number of followers, the date where the Twitter account was created, among others.
Figure 2 shows the pipeline to develop our Xenophobia database.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 9 of 27

DATABASE CREATION

• Download the tweets • Experts labeling

Figure 2. The creation of the Xenophobia database consisted of downloading tweets through the Twit-
FEATURE
ter API jointly with the Python REPRESENTATION
Tweepy library. CREATION
Then, Xenophobia experts took it upon themselves to
manually label the tweets.

We decided to keep only the raw text of each tweet to make a Xenophobia classifier
based only on text. We made this decision to extrapolate this approach to other platforms
because each social network has additional information that could not exist or is difficult to
access on other platforms [76]. For example, detailed profile information as geopositioning,
account creation date, preferred language; among others, are characteristics challenging to
obtain (even not provided) in • Obtain the sentiments,
other social networks. emotions,
In this way,intentions,
the exclusion of additional
syntactic features, and critical words.
information from the text allows focusing on its classification based solely on natural
language processing techniques such as sentiment, semantic and syntactic analysis [77],
which is more versatile for applying to any platform containing posts. As an additional
configuration for obtaining theMINING CONTRAST
analyzed tweets, we used PATTERNS
the (geo_search) Tweepy method
with the parameters (query= “USA”, granularity=“country”); consequently, it allowed us
to collect tweets issued from the USA and using the English language.
These data were collected in five weeks, from 27 June to 31 August 2021. The tweets
publication date corresponds with the collection’s date of the same. Each week 2000 tweets
were downloaded. For the labeling process, we were supported by five experts. Two
were psychologists, two were experts in international relations, and the last expert was a
sociologist. These experts were in charge of labeling the tweets manually.
Since a single Twitter API return can•return,
•Mining Filteringat most,•Explaining
100 tweets per looked term,
we followed the same scheme used by Pitropakis et al. [59]. We used a set of keywords
regarding Xenophobia instead of a single immigration term. Some of our xenophobic
keywords were the same as the ones used by Pitropakis et al., such as immigration, migrant,
and deport them all. While our experts proposed a new set of keywords, among which are:
illegal aliens, backcountry, and violent. Nevertheless, we also used a set of neutral terms
to make our database more diversified, such as sports, food, travel, love, money, among
others. As a result, a total of 10,073 tweets were annotated.
The collected tweets were labeled in two categories where 8056 tweets were labeled
as non-xenophobic, 2017 as xenophobic, where 79.97% of the labels correspond with the
non-Xenophobia class and the remainder, 20.03%, belong to the Xenophobia class. Table 2
shows two random examples of tweets belonging to each class. Finally, our collected
database was divided into 20 batches of 504 tweets, each one. Each expert was in charge of
labeling four batches for a total of 2016 tweets. After the first labeling process, a second
process was done by one of our experts in international relations. This second process was
to inspect again all the tweets labeled as xenophobic and look for any discrepancy.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 10 of 27

Table 2. Examples of tweets classified as xenophobic, non-xenophobic.

Class Example
No wonder why the 4Chan CHUDs have misunderstood the meaning of this movie
and then made it their foundational text. https://t.co/96M7rHy3fc
Non-xenophobic
i just received the best text in the world i truly love my friends so fucking much

@Jones17Charlene @FugginAlex The majority of the illegal alien migrant minors

are not being brought by their real relatives anyways. Furthermore, if they are that sickly
when they get here, I do not want them to make it into our cities.
Xenophobic
@learnin_as_i_go @orr_it You want a country of criminal foreigners all different
colours smoking drugs being gay and living in a council block baby machine!
No middle class just poor people!!!!

4.2. A New Feature Representation for Xenophobia Detection

When we classify dataDATABASE
in a text format,
CREATION and we want to obtain good results, we must
1
have a good machine learning classifier and an appropriate feature representation [78].
The problem with the feature representations based on numeric terms of the frequency of
the words is that they are not accessible for human understanding [79]. In this way, our
feature representation proposal was created to obtain good classification results and an
interpretable model. Figure 3 shows the pipeline to develop our new feature representa-
tion proposal. • Download the tweets • Experts labeling

2 FEATURE REPRESENTATION CREATION

• Sentiment • Syntactic • Keyword

Analysis Analysis Extraction

Figure 3. The creation of our feature representation proposal consisted of using three NLP APIs
3 MINING CONTRAST PATTERNS
(Parallel Dots [80], Meaning Cloud [81], IBM NLU [82]) to perform sentiment analysis and the Python
spaCy library [83] for extracting the syntactic features and the keywords of the tweets.

To create our new feature representation proposal and make it interpretable, we

decided to base our representation on three main bases: sentiment analysis, syntactic
analysis, and the extraction of keywords (semantic analysis) related to the Xenophobia class.
• Mining • Filtering • Classification
The sentimental analysis has been proved to be a good tool for making text classification
using interpretable models [84]. The use of sentiment, syntactic and semantic analysis
improves the classification results compared to the use of only sentiment analysis [77,85].
The first step was to perform the sentiment analysis; Figure 3 shows the different cloud
services that we use to perform the sentiment analysis. Table 3 shows a summary of the
features extracted from the cloud services and the field to which they belong.

Table 3. Set of features extracted from different cloud services.

Source Features Field

Parallel Dots Negative, Positive Sentiment
Meaning cloud Agreement, Score Tag Sentiment
Parallel Dots Bored, Sad, Happy, Excited Emotion
IBM NLU Joy, Disgust, Anger Emotion
Parallel Dots News, Spam, Marketing, Feedback, Complaint, Appreciation Intent
Parallel Dots Abusive, Hate-speech, Neither Abusive content

The second step was to perform the syntactic analysis; we used the spaCy python
library [83]. We employ the en_core_web_lg pipeline that is specifically designed for
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 11 of 27

blogs, news, and comments. This pipeline is pre-trained on the OntoNotes Release
5.0 data [86]. With this library, we were enabled to extract different linguistic features
using the spaCy Part-of-speech tagging implemented on its pipeline. For more infor-
mation related to Universal POS tags, it can be visited the following document: https:
//universaldependencies.org/docs/u/pos/ (accessed on 15 April 2021). The linguistic
features extracted from spaCy are:
• ADJ: (INT) The number of adjectives presented in the tweet.
• AUX: (INT) The number of auxiliary verbs presented in the tweet.
• NUM: (INT) The number of numbers presented in the tweet.
• PROPN: (INT) The number of proper nouns presented in the tweet.
• ALPHAS: (INT) The number of words presented in the tweet that are not stopwords.
• HASHTAGS: (INT) The number of hashtags presented in the tweet.
• URLs: (BOOL) If the tweet has a URL or not.
Finally, the third step was to extract the most representative xenophobic words of
the database according to their frequency. Beyond the fact that our database was created
using xenophobic keywords, not all the tweets with a xenophobic word were labeled
as xenophobic. Furthermore, there are new terms related to Xenophobia that were not
proposed at creating the database. The process to extract the new xenophobic keywords
was as follows:
• Clean the tweet: To clean the tweet, we normalize the tweets by removing stopwords,
unknown characters, numbers, URLs, user mentions, and then apply lemmatization.
Lemmatization is a normalization technique [87], generally defined as “the transfor-
mation of all inflected word forms contained in a text to their dictionary look-up
form” [88].
• Get the frequency of the words: For each class (Xenophobic and Not-xenophobic) it
was generated a list of all the words that belong to the class, then it was counted the
frequency of each term, and it was gotten a dictionary where the word was the key,
and the frequency was the value.
• Extract the xenophobic keywords: After getting the frequency of the words, they
were sorted by the highest to the lowest frequency, and it was selected only the
20 most used words. It was considered two conditions to determine if a comment
might be regarded as a xenophobic keyword. The first condition: if the word only
belongs to the xenophobic class, this means that the term is present in the 20 most
used words list of the Xenophobia class and did not belong to the other list. The
second condition: if the word is presented in both lists, but the absolute frequency of
the word is more significant in the Xenophobia list than the non-Xenophobia list.
When we consider the proportion of the tweets that belong to the Xenophobia and
no-Xenophobia class, we can realize that for each tweet that was labeled as xenophobic,
there are four tweets labeled as non-xenophobic. If a word has the same use frequency
in both classes, we can say that the word is four times more used in the xenophobic class.
The above process was used again to obtain bigrams, sequences of two words that appear
together or near each other. As a result, the following list of words was obtained. Five are
unigrams, and five are bigrams: country, illegal, foreigners, alien, criminal, back country,
illegal alien, violent foreigners, criminal foreigners, criminal migrant.
Table 4 shows the number of features grouped by different key labels for our INTER
feature representation. In total, 37 features were used to construct our new feature repre-
sentation proposal. Of which 20 were from the sentiment analysis, seven were extracted
from the syntactic analysis, and the last ten were from the xenophobic keyword extraction
process described above. Finally, Table 5 shows an example of two tweets extracted from
EXD, one belonging to the non-Xenophobia class and the other to the Xenophobia class.
These tweets were transformed using our interpretable feture representation and Table 6
shows each feature grouped by different key labels.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 12 of 27

Table 4. Distribution of the features presented in our INTER feature representation. The overall
column shows the total number of features.

Number of Features Grouped by Different Key Labels.

Sentiment Emotion Intent Abusive Content Xenophobia Keywords Syntactic Features Overall
4 7 6 3 10 7 37

Table 5. Example of tweets belonging to the non-Xenophobia and Xenophobia class.

Class Tweet
Immigrant families deserve to live without fear in Massachusetts, especially amid the #COVID19
Non-Xenophobia pandemic. It’s a moral imperative. Let us align our laws with our values! Pass the
#SafeCommunitiesAct ASAP! @MassGovernor @KarenSpilka @SpeakerDeLeo #MALeg

@EUTimesNET I do not know what liberal idiot runs your site but the USA is not a hellhole. We
Xenophobia may have racist terrorists running around burning things but Europe has violent migrants raping
women, vandalizing churches and attacking Christians. You’re far from a model region.

Table 6. Example of our interpretable feature representation for tweets belonging to the Xenophobia
and non-Xenophobia class grouped by different key labels.

(a) Sentiment features.

Class Negative Positive Agreement Score tag
Non-Xenophobia 0.202 0.458 AGREEMENT Neutral
Xenophobia 0.707 0.094 DISAGREEMENT Negative

(b) Emotion features.

Class Bored Sad Happy Excited Joy Disgust Anger
Non-Xenophobia 0.0240 0.1341 0.2205 0.2371 0.1766 0.2272 0.1721
Xenophobia 0.0251 0.0566 0.0718 0.2963 0.0047 0.5043 0.4510

(c) Intent features.

Class News Spam Marketing Feedback Complaint Appreciation
Non-Xenophobia 0.6940 0.0410 0.0730 0.1770 Null Null
Xenophobia 0.8260 0.0400 0.0480 0.0800 Null Null

(d) Abusive content features.

Class Abusive Hate-speech Neither
Non-Xenophobia 0.0092 0.8499 0.1408
Xenophobia 0.0005 0.9990 0.0005

(e) Unigram Xenophobia Keywords.

Class Country Illegal Foreigners Alien Criminal
Non-Xenophobia not present not present not present not present not present
Xenophobia not present not present present not present not present

(f) Bigram Xenophobia Keywords.

Class Back country Illegal alien Violent foreigners Criminal foreigners Criminal migrant
Non-Xenophobia not present not present not present not present not present
Xenophobia not present not present present not present not present

(g) Syntactic features.

Class ADJ AUX NUM PROPN ALPHAS HASHTAGS URLs
Non-Xenophobia 2 1 0 5 19 not present 3
Xenophobia 3 0 0 2 20 not present 0

4.3. Mining Contrast Patterns

Nowadays, various understandable classifications models can bring us an explanation
about the classification [89]. Nevertheless, from all the understandable classification
models, the contrast pattern-based models are one of the most prominent [90], not only for
the explanatory power but also because different studies have proved that these models
provide good results for class imbalance problems [36,90]. Figure 4 shows the pipeline to
extract the contrast patterns.
 2 FEATURE REPRESENTATION CREATION

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 13 of 27

• Obtain the sentiments, emotions, intentions,

syntactic features, and critical words.

3 MINING CONTRAST PATTERNS

• Mining • Filtering • Classification

Figure 4. The extraction of the contrast patterns consist on three phases mining, filtering and classifi-
cation.

According to Dong and Bailey [38], a pattern is a condition on data tuples that eval-
uates to either true or false. To be considered a pattern, the succinct state must be much
simpler and smaller than the original length of the data. Ordinarily, a pattern is represented
by a conjunction of relational statements, each with the form: [fi # vj ], where vj is a value
within the space of feature fi , and # is a relational operator taken from the set { =, 6=, ≤, >,
∈, ∈
/, } [33,36,38]. For example, [violent foreigners = “present”] ∧ [hate−speech ≥ 0.11], is a
pattern describing post xenophobes.
In comparison, contrast patterns are a type of pattern whose supports differ sig-
nificantly among the analyzed databases [38]. There are three steps to build a contrast
pattern-based classifier: mining, filtering, and classification [3,33]:
• Mining: it is committed to looking for a set of candidate patterns by an exploratory
examination using a search-space, characterized by a group of inductive limitations
given by the user.
• filtering: it is committed to choosing a set of high-quality patterns from the mining
stage; this step permits equal or superior results than using all the patterns extracted
at the mining step.
• Classification: it is responsible for looking for the finest methodology to combine the
data provided by a subset of patterns and construct an accurate model that is based
on patterns.
We decided to use the Random Forest Miner (RFMiner) [91] as our algorithm for
mining contrast patterns during the first step. García-Borroto et al. [92] conducted a large
number of experiments comparing several well-known contrast pattern mining algorithms
that are based on decision trees. According to the results obtained in their experiments,
García-Borroto et al. have shown that RFMiner is capable of creating diversity of trees. This
feature allows RFMiner to obtain more high-quality patterns compared to other known
pattern miners. The filtering algorithms can be divided into two groups: based on set
theory and based on quality measure [33]. For our filtering process, we start using the
set theory approach. We remove redundant items from patterns and duplicated patterns.
Furthermore, we choose only general patterns. After this filtering process, we kept the
patterns with higher support.
Finally, we decided to use PBC4cip [36] as our contrast pattern-based classifier for the
classification phase due to the good results that PBC4cip has reached in class imbalance
problems. This classifier uses 150 trees by default; nevertheless, after many experiments
classifying the patterns, we use only 15 trees, looking for the simplest model with good
classification results in the AUC score metric. We repeated this process, reducing the
number of trees and minimizing the AUC loss and the number of trees. A stop criterion was
executed when the AUC score obtained in our experiments was more than 1% compared
with the results that PBC4Cip reaches with the default number of trees.

5. Experimental Setup
This section shows the methodology designed to evaluate the performance of the
tested classifiers. For our experiments, we use two databases: our Experts Xenophobia
Database (EXD), which consists of 10,057 tweets labeled by experts in the fields of inter-
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 14 of 27

national relations, sociologists, and psychologists. Additionally, we use the Xenophobia

database created by Pitropakis et al. [59]; for this article, we will refer to this database
as Pitropakis Xenophobia Database (PXD). Table 7 shows the number of tweets per class
for the PXD and EXD databases before and after applying the cleaning method. Figure 5
shows the flow diagram to obtain our experimental results. The flow diagram starts from
getting each database and then transforming it using different feature representations and
finishing bringing the performance of each classifier. Below, we will briefly explain what
each of the steps in the said figure consists of:

1 2 3 4 5 6

Feature
Database Cleaning Representation
Partition Classifier Evaluation

Figure 5. Flow diagram for the procedure of getting the classification results of the Xenopho-
bia databases.

1. Database: The first step consisted of obtaining the Xenophobia databases used to train
and validate all the tested machine learning classifiers detailed in step number five.
2. Cleaning: For each database, our proposed cleaning method was used to obtain a
clean version of the database. Our cleaning method was specially designed to work
with databases made on Twitter. It removes unknown characters, hyperlinks, retweet
text, and user mentions. Additionally, our cleaning method converts the most used
slang to their original word, removes stop words, and applies lemmatization. Finally,
it removes tweets that are identical before and after applying the normalization
process described above.
3. Feature representation: For each database, different feature representations were
used to convert tweets into representations used by the tested machine learning
classifiers. We use the following well-known feature representations: Bag Of Words
(BOW) [93], Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) [60], Word To
Vector (W2V) [94], and our interpretable proposal (INTER).
4. Partition: For each feature representation, five partitions were generated. Each
partition was performed using the Distribution Optimally Balanced Stratified Cross-
Validation (DOB-SCV) method [95]. According to Zeng and Martinez [95], the princi-
pal advantage of DOB-SCV is that it keeps a better distribution balance in the feature
space when splitting a sample into groups called folds. This property empowers
the cross-validation training set better to capture the distribution features within the
actual data set.
5. Classifier: For each partition, the following machine learning classifiers were used:
C4.5 (C45) [96], k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) [97], Rusboost (RUS) [98], UnderBagging
(UND) [99], and PBC4cip [36]. Except for KNN, the other classifiers are based on
decision trees. The classifiers mentioned above have been implemented in the KEEL
software [100], except for PBC4cip, which is a package available for the Weka Data-
Mining software tool [101]; it can be taken from https://sites.google.com/view/
leocanetesifuentes/software/multivariate-pbc4cip (accessed on 20 October 2020).
6. Evaluation: For each classifier, we used the following performance evaluations met-
rics: F1 score and Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) [102]. These metrics are widely
used in the literature for class imbalance problems [103,104].
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 15 of 27

Table 7. Comparison between the number of tweets belonging to the non-xenophobic and xenophobic
classes before and after using the cleaning method. The class imbalance ratio (IR) is calculated as the
proportion between the number of objects belonging to the majority class and the number of objects
belonging to the minority class [36]. The higher the IR value, the more imbalanced the database is.

Before Cleaning Method After Cleaning Method

Database No Xenophobia Xenophobia Total IR No Xenophobia Xenophobia Total IR
PXD 3971 2114 6085 1.88 3826 1988 5814 1.92
EXD 8056 2017 10,073 3.99 8054 2003 10,057 4.02

On the one hand, our INTER feature representation method proposal is designed to
be interpretable and provide a set of feelings, emotions, and keywords from a given text.
On the other hand, the feature representation BOW, TFIDF, and W2V transform an input
text into a numeric vector [105]. According to Luo et al. [79] these numeric transformations
are considered black-box and prevent them from being human-readable.
We can also mention that there are methods based on neural networks built from the
numeric feature representation methods achieving interpretable results [106]. On the one
hand, the interpretability of the neural networks is based on highlighting the keywords
that a text has to belong to a class [106]; on the other hand, our approach seeks to obtain
more interpretability features such as feelings, emotions, and intentions; this can allow an
expert to understand why a text is considered to be xenophobic with more detail.
Table 8 shows a summary of the information presented above, synthesizing which
classifiers and feature representation are interpretable and which classifiers use contrast
patterns or not. From Table 8a, and the C4.5’s definition stated by Ting et al. [96],
García et al. [107], and Dong and Bailey [38] (see Section 4 for more detail), we can com-
ment that the tree-based classifiers are interpretable; however, only PBC4cip uses contrast
patterns. Finally, Table 8b shows that the only feature representation being interpretable is
our INTER feature representation proposal.

Table 8. Summary of the characteristics of the classifiers and the interpretability of the feature repre-
sentations.

(a) Characteristics of the classifiers.

Classifier Is interpretable? Is it contrast pattern-based?
C45 3 7
KNN 7 7
RUS 3 7
UND 3 7
PBC4cip 3 3
(b) Interpretability of the feature representations.
Feature representation Is interpretable?
BOW 7
TFIDF 7
W2V 7
INTER 7

6. Experimental Results and Discussion

For a better understanding of our experiment results, we have split this section into
two subsections: in Section 6.1, we show all the classification results for both metrics, Area
Under the Curve (AUC) and F1 score, and in Section 6.2, we present an analysis of the
obtained patterns describing the Xenophobia class.

6.1. Classification Results

Using the methodology proposed in Section 5, we can analyze the classification results
obtained on both EXD and PXD databases. Figure 6 show box-and-whisker plots for both
databases regarding AUC and F1 score metrics. The box-and-whiskers plot, also known as
a boxplot, is a chart used in descriptive data analysis [108].
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 16 of 27

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Figure 6. Box-and-whisker plots for the AUC and F1 score metrics. The boxes are sorted in ascending
order according to their median.

The boxplots are very useful to compare the distribution between many groups where
each box of the boxplot represents the distribution of a group. In our case, each box
represents the combination’s results for both AUC and F1 score metrics presented in
Table 9. Boxplots show the next five-number summary of a group:
• The minimum score: is the lowest score present in the set, excluding outliers. In the
chart, it is represented as the line below the box.
• Lower quartile: also known as the first quartile or Q1, the lower quartile is a line
where 25% of the scores fall below this value. In the chart, it is represented as the
bottom line of the box.
• Median: also known as second quartile or Q2, the median is a line where half of the
scores are less than this value, and half are greater. In the cart, it is represented as the
middle line of the box.
• Upper quartile: also known as third quartile or Q3, the upper quartile is a line where
75% of the scores fall below this value. In the chart, it is represented as the upper line
of the box.
• Maximum score: is the highest score present in the set, excluding outliers. In the
chart, it is represented as the line above the box.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 17 of 27

In Figure 6, the best combination of embedding method and classifier is the one that
has more score in the median. On the one hand, in Figure 6a, when EXD is used, the
combination with a higher median is BOW+C45 for both AUC and F1 metric scores. On
the other hand, Figure 6b shows that for PXD, the best combination is TFIDF+P4C. It is
worth mentioning that the best combinations of embedding methods and classifiers that
maximize the AUC and F1 score results for EXD and PXD are not interpretable.
Taking into account all the interpretable combinations that are presented in the Table 8
and comparing their results presented in Figure 6, we can see that for both databases, the
combination INTER+P4C is the one providing the best score metric results.
Table 9 shows the results of each partition for both databases regarding AUC and
F1 score metrics. We highlight the INTER+P4C results in Table 9a,b. In this way, we can
compare each database’s differences easily when using the same combination. It is essential
to compare the average (AVG) results and their standard deviation (STD); this allows us to
understand the differences between each database.
From Table 9, we can obtain the following observations:
• For EXD, the combinations with the lowest STD in both metrics are W2V+P4C and
BOW+P4C, while for PXD, they are TFIDF+P4C and TDIDF+RUS.
• For EXD, the combinations with the highest AVG in both metrics are INTER+P4C and
BOW+C45, while for PXD, they are TFIDF+C45, BOW+P4C.
• For EXD, the best combination in terms of AVG and STD is BOW+C45, while for
PXD, it is TFIDF+P4C. The difference between these models is, on the one hand, that
BOW+C45 in EDX achieves 0.040 more than TFIDF+P4C in both AUC and F1 score
metrics. On the other hand, TFIDF+P4C in PDX has approximately 0.003 fewer STD
than BOW+C45 in EXD.
Table 10 shows a comparison of results between EXD and PDX for the combinations
of the embedding method and classifier that are interpretable. When we compare both
AVG and STD for the interpretable combinations present in Table 10 we can observe the
following characteristics.
• The best interpretable combinations are INTER+P4C and INTER+C45 for both databases.
INTER+P4C shows a difference of 0.050 or greater in both AUC and F1 scores than
INTER+C45 in EXD. This difference is greater in PXD.
• On the one hand, on AVG, the results obtained in AUC are higher in EXD than in PXD.
On the other hand, the AVG results for the F1 score are higher in EXD only for the
P4C and C45 classifiers.
• The STD in EXD for the INTER+P4C and INTER+C45 combinations is less than in
PXD for both AUC and F1 score metrics.
• The combination with the lowest STD is INTER+UND using PXD, while the combina-
tion with the highest STD is INTER+P4C using PXD.
With the above observations, we can conclude that the results obtained by INTER+P4C
are better than the other interpretable combinations. Furthermore, INTER+P4C has a higher
AVG, and it is more robust according to their STD in EXD than in PXD.
Notice that Table 11 shows very relevant information for the analysis of results. In this
table, we can observe exceptional characteristics. Let us first analyze the results obtained
by EXD (see Table 11a).
• In two of the five partitions, the INTER+P4C configuration had the best results for
both AUC and F1 scores (partition one and partition two).
• In terms of F1 score, INTER+P4C always placed in the top five positions, while for
AUC, there were two occasions in which it was in seven places.
• When we compare the best partition of INTER+P4C, partition number two, against
the best partition of BOW+C45, partition one. We can see that the best results of
INTER+P4C are 0.11 AUC points and 0.15 F1 score points superior.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 18 of 27

• For all the embedding methods, the P4C classifier is always within the top ten of
20 regardless of partition or metric. Not only that, within the top five of each partition
of each metric, there are always at least two combinations of embedding methods
jointly with a classifier that uses P4C as a classifier.

Table 9. Results of the AUC and F1 score metrics. Each row represents the combination of an embed-
ding method jointly with a classifier. In AVG the best interpretable combination is INTER+P4C.

(a) Classification results for the Experts Xenophobia Database.

Partition 1 Partition 2 Partition 3 Partition 4 Partition 5 AVG STD
COMBINATION
AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1
BOW+C45 0.856 0.791 0.847 0.790 0.820 0.759 0.844 0.797 0.826 0.772 0.839 0.782 0.013 0.014
BOW+KNN 0.696 0.536 0.695 0.533 0.699 0.540 0.689 0.521 0.675 0.500 0.691 0.526 0.008 0.014
BOW+P4C 0.802 0.568 0.800 0.565 0.798 0.561 0.804 0.573 0.805 0.569 0.802 0.567 0.003 0.004
BOW+RUS 0.704 0.514 0.704 0.525 0.659 0.459 0.704 0.529 0.694 0.509 0.693 0.507 0.017 0.025
BOW+UND 0.706 0.514 0.703 0.525 0.702 0.522 0.714 0.548 0.700 0.522 0.705 0.526 0.005 0.012
INTER+C45 0.883 0.827 0.875 0.815 0.766 0.653 0.763 0.642 0.766 0.654 0.811 0.718 0.056 0.084
INTER+KNN 0.737 0.573 0.742 0.581 0.727 0.567 0.740 0.592 0.709 0.546 0.731 0.572 0.012 0.015
INTER+P4C 0.965 0.920 0.967 0.942 0.786 0.650 0.792 0.665 0.808 0.661 0.864 0.768 0.084 0.134
INTER+RUS 0.770 0.528 0.761 0.504 0.779 0.600 0.794 0.615 0.801 0.590 0.781 0.568 0.015 0.043
INTER+UND 0.752 0.494 0.715 0.436 0.819 0.614 0.776 0.557 0.809 0.549 0.774 0.530 0.038 0.061
TFIDF+C45 0.838 0.773 0.829 0.758 0.831 0.769 0.820 0.746 0.815 0.741 0.827 0.757 0.008 0.013
TFIDF+KNN 0.651 0.452 0.703 0.548 0.710 0.550 0.683 0.510 0.701 0.537 0.690 0.519 0.021 0.037
TFIDF+P4C 0.805 0.579 0.818 0.592 0.819 0.595 0.809 0.581 0.800 0.568 0.810 0.583 0.007 0.010
TFIDF+RUS 0.636 0.418 0.621 0.393 0.613 0.378 0.627 0.403 0.621 0.391 0.624 0.397 0.008 0.014
TFIDF+UND 0.643 0.430 0.625 0.399 0.613 0.376 0.632 0.412 0.618 0.387 0.626 0.401 0.010 0.019
W2V+C45 0.690 0.506 0.706 0.526 0.708 0.538 0.703 0.523 0.694 0.504 0.700 0.519 0.007 0.013
W2V+KNN 0.756 0.584 0.784 0.620 0.776 0.615 0.732 0.554 0.775 0.605 0.764 0.596 0.018 0.024
W2V+P4C 0.820 0.636 0.823 0.644 0.827 0.646 0.823 0.633 0.812 0.624 0.821 0.637 0.005 0.008
W2V+RUS 0.687 0.464 0.653 0.427 0.630 0.403 0.666 0.438 0.684 0.463 0.664 0.439 0.021 0.023
W2V+UND 0.671 0.436 0.580 0.370 0.605 0.385 0.637 0.408 0.696 0.462 0.638 0.412 0.042 0.033

(b) Classification results for the Pitropakis Xenphobia Database.

Partition 1 Partition 2 Partition 3 Partition 4 Partition 5 AVG STD
COMBINATION
AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1
BOW+C45 0.754 0.675 0.796 0.733 0.793 0.729 0.778 0.710 0.784 0.717 0.781 0.713 0.015 0.021
BOW+KNN 0.674 0.544 0.686 0.561 0.677 0.549 0.665 0.526 0.648 0.491 0.670 0.534 0.013 0.025
BOW+P4C 0.780 0.706 0.811 0.745 0.805 0.737 0.804 0.735 0.806 0.736 0.801 0.732 0.011 0.013
BOW+RUS 0.627 0.435 0.647 0.478 0.645 0.467 0.636 0.443 0.641 0.456 0.639 0.456 0.007 0.016
BOW+UND 0.624 0.421 0.654 0.490 0.643 0.464 0.639 0.453 0.636 0.443 0.639 0.454 0.010 0.023
INTER+C45 0.851 0.809 0.853 0.810 0.648 0.531 0.652 0.537 0.618 0.490 0.725 0.635 0.105 0.143
INTER+KNN 0.633 0.520 0.622 0.504 0.611 0.484 0.605 0.477 0.605 0.483 0.615 0.494 0.011 0.016
INTER+P4C 0.967 0.951 0.955 0.939 0.700 0.612 0.659 0.576 0.688 0.593 0.794 0.734 0.137 0.172
INTER+RUS 0.700 0.656 0.623 0.552 0.644 0.566 0.658 0.590 0.662 0.590 0.657 0.591 0.025 0.036
INTER+UND 0.627 0.593 0.635 0.586 0.647 0.571 0.691 0.624 0.682 0.615 0.656 0.598 0.026 0.019
TFIDF+C45 0.741 0.658 0.763 0.689 0.773 0.704 0.784 0.718 0.749 0.669 0.762 0.687 0.015 0.022
TFIDF+KNN 0.598 0.410 0.633 0.493 0.640 0.505 0.623 0.474 0.645 0.510 0.628 0.478 0.017 0.037
TFIDF+P4C 0.789 0.716 0.812 0.745 0.808 0.740 0.799 0.730 0.812 0.745 0.804 0.735 0.009 0.011
TFIDF+RUS 0.513 0.146 0.505 0.115 0.513 0.149 0.513 0.143 0.501 0.109 0.509 0.132 0.005 0.017
TFIDF+UND 0.517 0.170 0.512 0.132 0.511 0.151 0.513 0.136 0.505 0.097 0.512 0.137 0.004 0.024
W2V+C45 0.642 0.531 0.629 0.507 0.663 0.561 0.658 0.553 0.653 0.541 0.649 0.539 0.012 0.019
W2V+KNN 0.713 0.625 0.741 0.659 0.710 0.620 0.704 0.613 0.708 0.617 0.715 0.627 0.013 0.017
W2V+P4C 0.750 0.671 0.777 0.705 0.780 0.710 0.766 0.691 0.782 0.710 0.771 0.698 0.012 0.015
W2V+RUS 0.619 0.460 0.641 0.519 0.684 0.582 0.674 0.579 0.665 0.554 0.657 0.539 0.023 0.046
W2V+UND 0.679 0.573 0.677 0.574 0.708 0.624 0.662 0.561 0.712 0.621 0.688 0.591 0.019 0.026

Table 10. Comparison of the interpretable combinations in EXD and PXD.

Experts Xenophobia Database Pitropakis Xenophobia Database

AVG STD AVG STD
COMBINATION COMBINATION
AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1
INTER+P4C 0.864 0.768 0.084 0.134 INTER+P4C 0.794 0.734 0.137 0.172
INTER+C45 0.811 0.718 0.056 0.084 INTER+C45 0.725 0.635 0.105 0.143
INTER+RUS 0.781 0.568 0.015 0.043 INTER+RUS 0.657 0.591 0.025 0.036
INTER+UND 0.774 0.530 0.038 0.061 INTER+UND 0.656 0.598 0.026 0.019
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 19 of 27

Table 11. Ranking of the AUC and F1 score metrics. Each cell represents the combination of an
embedding method jointly with a classifier. The best interpretable combination is INTER+P4C.
(a) Ranks for the Experts Xenophobia Database.

Partition 1 Partition 2 Partition 3 Partition 4 Partition 5

RANK
AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1

1 INTER+P4C INTER+P4C INTER+P4C INTER+P4C TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45 BOW+C45 BOW+C45 BOW+C45 BOW+C45
2 INTER+C45 INTER+C45 INTER+C45 INTER+C45 W2V+P4C BOW+C45 W2V+P4C TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45
3 BOW+C45 BOW+C45 BOW+C45 BOW+C45 BOW+C45 INTER+C45 TFIDF+C45 INTER+P4C W2V+P4C INTER+P4C
4 TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+P4C INTER+P4C TFIDF+P4C INTER+C45 INTER+UND INTER+C45
5 W2V+P4C W2V+P4C W2V+P4C W2V+P4C INTER+UND W2V+P4C BOW+P4C W2V+P4C INTER+P4C W2V+P4C
6 TFIDF+P4C W2V+KNN TFIDF+P4C W2V+KNN BOW+P4C W2V+KNN INTER+RUS INTER+RUS BOW+P4C W2V+KNN
7 BOW+P4C TFIDF+P4C BOW+P4C TFIDF+P4C INTER+P4C INTER+UND INTER+P4C INTER+KNN INTER+RUS INTER+RUS
8 INTER+RUS INTER+KNN W2V+KNN INTER+KNN INTER+RUS INTER+RUS INTER+UND TFIDF+P4C TFIDF+P4C BOW+P4C
9 W2V+KNN BOW+P4C INTER+RUS BOW+P4C W2V+KNN TFIDF+P4C INTER+C45 BOW+P4C W2V+KNN TFIDF+P4C
10 INTER+UND BOW+KNN INTER+KNN TFIDF+KNN INTER+C45 INTER+KNN INTER+KNN INTER+UND INTER+C45 INTER+UND
11 INTER+KNN INTER+RUS INTER+UND BOW+KNN INTER+KNN BOW+P4C W2V+KNN W2V+KNN INTER+KNN INTER+KNN
12 BOW+UND BOW+RUS W2V+C45 W2V+C45 TFIDF+KNN TFIDF+KNN BOW+UND BOW+UND TFIDF+KNN TFIDF+KNN
13 BOW+RUS BOW+UND BOW+RUS BOW+RUS W2V+C45 BOW+KNN BOW+RUS BOW+RUS BOW+UND BOW+UND
14 BOW+KNN W2V+C45 TFIDF+KNN BOW+UND BOW+UND W2V+C45 W2V+C45 W2V+C45 W2V+UND BOW+RUS
15 W2V+C45 INTER+UND BOW+UND INTER+RUS BOW+KNN BOW+UND BOW+KNN BOW+KNN W2V+C45 W2V+C45
16 W2V+RUS W2V+RUS BOW+KNN INTER+UND BOW+RUS BOW+RUS TFIDF+KNN TFIDF+KNN BOW+RUS BOW+KNN
17 W2V+UND TFIDF+KNN W2V+RUS W2V+RUS W2V+RUS W2V+RUS W2V+RUS W2V+RUS W2V+RUS W2V+RUS
18 TFIDF+KNN W2V+UND TFIDF+UND TFIDF+UND TFIDF+UND W2V+UND W2V+UND TFIDF+UND BOW+KNN W2V+UND
19 TFIDF+UND TFIDF+UND TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+UND W2V+UND TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+RUS
20 TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+RUS W2V+UND W2V+UND W2V+UND TFIDF+UND TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+UND TFIDF+UND

(b) Ranks for the Pitropakis Xenophobia Database.

Partition 1 Partition 2 Partition 3 Partition 4 Partition 5

RANK
AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1 AUC F1

1 INTER+P4C INTER+P4C INTER+P4C INTER+P4C TFIDF+P4C TFIDF+P4C BOW+P4C BOW+P4C TFIDF+P4C TFIDF+P4C
2 INTER+C45 INTER+C45 INTER+C45 INTER+C45 BOW+P4C BOW+P4C TFIDF+P4C TFIDF+P4C BOW+P4C BOW+P4C
3 TFIDF+P4C TFIDF+P4C TFIDF+P4C BOW+P4C BOW+C45 BOW+C45 TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45 BOW+C45 BOW+C45
4 BOW+P4C BOW+P4C BOW+P4C TFIDF+P4C W2V+P4C W2V+P4C BOW+C45 BOW+C45 W2V+P4C W2V+P4C
5 BOW+C45 BOW+C45 BOW+C45 BOW+C45 TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45 W2V+P4C W2V+P4C TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45
6 W2V+P4C W2V+P4C W2V+P4C W2V+P4C W2V+KNN W2V+UND W2V+KNN INTER+UND W2V+UND W2V+UND
7 TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45 TFIDF+C45 W2V+UND W2V+KNN INTER+UND W2V+KNN W2V+KNN W2V+KNN
8 W2V+KNN INTER+RUS W2V+KNN W2V+KNN INTER+P4C INTER+P4C W2V+RUS INTER+RUS INTER+P4C INTER+UND
9 INTER+RUS W2V+KNN BOW+KNN INTER+UND W2V+RUS W2V+RUS BOW+KNN W2V+RUS INTER+UND INTER+P4C
10 W2V+UND INTER+UND W2V+UND W2V+UND BOW+KNN INTER+UND W2V+UND INTER+P4C W2V+RUS INTER+RUS
11 BOW+KNN W2V+UND BOW+UND BOW+KNN W2V+C45 INTER+RUS INTER+P4C W2V+UND INTER+RUS W2V+RUS
12 W2V+C45 BOW+KNN BOW+RUS INTER+RUS INTER+C45 W2V+C45 W2V+C45 W2V+C45 W2V+C45 W2V+C45
13 INTER+KNN W2V+C45 W2V+RUS W2V+RUS INTER+UND BOW+KNN INTER+RUS INTER+C45 BOW+KNN TFIDF+KNN
14 INTER+UND INTER+KNN INTER+UND W2V+C45 BOW+RUS INTER+C45 INTER+C45 BOW+KNN TFIDF+KNN BOW+KNN
15 BOW+RUS W2V+RUS TFIDF+KNN INTER+KNN INTER+RUS TFIDF+KNN BOW+UND INTER+KNN BOW+RUS INTER+C45
16 BOW+UND BOW+RUS W2V+C45 TFIDF+KNN BOW+UND INTER+KNN BOW+RUS TFIDF+KNN BOW+UND INTER+KNN
17 W2V+RUS BOW+UND INTER+RUS BOW+UND TFIDF+KNN BOW+RUS TFIDF+KNN BOW+UND INTER+C45 BOW+RUS
18 TFIDF+KNN TFIDF+KNN INTER+KNN BOW+RUS INTER+KNN BOW+UND INTER+KNN BOW+RUS INTER+KNN BOW+UND
19 TFIDF+UND TFIDF+UND TFIDF+UND TFIDF+UND TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+UND TFIDF+UND TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+UND TFIDF+RUS
20 TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+UND TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+UND TFIDF+RUS TFIDF+UND

When we analyze the results obtained on PXD (see Table 11b), we can observe a
behavior very similar to that described above for the INTER+P4C combination. The main
feature that PXD share with EXD is that the first two partitions have the best AUC and F1
scores. However, in the following partitions, a lower position is observed in the position
obtained by INTER+P4C. This agrees with the STD shown in Table 9. Considering the
rank distribution obtained by INTER+P4C in both AUC and F1 score metrics, it can be
concluded that EXD Table 11a, has more consistent results than those obtained in PXD (see
Table 11b).
Finally, Figure 7 seeks to synthesize the results presented in this section. We can easily
see that each point represents a combination embedding method (color) jointly with a
classifier (shape) with these graphs. It obtains the best results for the AUC and F1 scores. It
is important to note that each subgraph in Figure 7 shows the embedding method jointly
with classifier results regarding AUC and F1 score metrics for EDX and PDX databases. We
also see that each subgraph, in turn, contains two graphs.
On the one hand, in Figure 7a the left section, each embedding method jointly with a
classifier combination is ordered according to the AVG result obtained for the AUC and F1
score. On the other hand, in Figure 7a the right section, each combination is ordered by the
median. Additionally, we can see that each subgraph has the same scale for both the F1
score and AUC score; with this, we can see that the closer the points are to each other, the
embedding method jointly with a classifier combination is more robust.
For example, in Figure 7a, the green circle represents TFIDF+C45. Both in the graphs,
orders by AVG and by median are in a very similar position. This means that TFIDF+C45
is a very reliable combination, offering promising results for both metrics.
In both Figure 7a,b, regardless of the embedding method, the P4C classifier generally
obtains good results this classifier shows to get better results in the AUC metric than for the
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 20 of 27

F1 score. Nevertheless, the classifier C45 also has good results for both AVG and median
but works best for the embeddings BOW and TFIDF than for INTER and W2V.

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Figure 7. The color represents the embedding method, while the shape represents the classifier. The
X-axis is the result of the AUC score. The Y-axis is the result of the F1 score. The graphs are ordered
by mean and median according to the results of Table 9.

6.2. Extracted Patterns

This section discusses the interpretable contrast patterns obtained from the Expert
Xenophobic database. The combination INTER+P4C extract better contrast patterns in
terms of support in EDX than PXD. For this reason, we decided to use the contrast patterns
from EDX. In Table 12, we can see ten representative contrast patterns. Five belong to
the Xenophobia class, and five belong to the non-Xenophobia class. These patterns are
arranged in descending order by their support.
According to Loyola-González et al. [3], the contrast pattern-based classifiers provide
a model that is easy for a human to understand. The readability of the contrast patterns is
very wide as they have few items. The first observations we can make about Table 12 shows
the Xenophobia class’s contrast patterns having slightly more support than for the non-
Xenophobia class. The patterns describing the Xenophobia class are more straightforward
in terms of many items than the patterns for the non-Xenophobia class. It is important
to note that the patterns describing the Xenophobia class are formed by the presence of a
negative feeling or emotion and a keyword.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 21 of 27

Table 12. Example of contrast patterns extracted from the Experts Xenophobic Database.

Class ID Items Supp

CP1 [foreigners = “present”] ∧ [disgust > 0.15] 0.12
[illegal = “present”] ∧ [angry > 0.19] ∧
CP2 0.11
Xenophobic hashtags = “not present” ∧ [foreigners = “present”]
CP3 [foreigners = “present”] ∧ [sad ≤ 0.15] 0.10
CP4 [angry > 0.17] ∧ [violentForeigners = “present”] 0.07
CP5 [criminalForeigners = “present”] 0.06
[positive > 0.53] ∧ [joy > 0.44] ∧ [negative < 0.11]
CP6 0.09
∧ [hate-speech ≤ 0.04]
Non- [angry ≤ 0.17] ∧ [hate-speech ≤ 0.06] ∧
CP7 0.08
Xenophobic negative < 0.10 ∧ [country = “not present”]
[illegal = “not present”] ∧ [foreigners = “not present”]
CP8 0.08
∧ [backCountry = “not present”] ∧ [joy > 0.42]
[positive > 0.53] ∧ [angry ≤ 0.13] ∧ [spam ≤ 0.56]
CP9 0.06
∧ [ALPHAS > 9.50]
CP10 [hate-speech ≤ 0.11] ∧ [foreigners = “not present”] 0.05

Combining a keyword plus a sentiment or intention is crucial since we can contex-

tualize the keyword and extract the word’s true meaning. On the one hand, the CP4
pattern shows us how the bigram “violent foreigners” has 0.07 support for the Xenophobia
classification when the emotion that accompanies the text has at least a little anger. On
the other hand, the CP5 pattern is significant since it shows that even without the need for
an associated feeling or emotion, the bigram “criminal foreigners” has the support of 0.06
of the Xenophobia class, this means that when this set of words is present is an excellent
indicator for detecting Xenophobia.
The contrast patterns obtained for the non-Xenophobia class have more items than
for the non-Xenophobia class. Only CP10 has two items, while the others have four items.
Coherently concerning xenophobic patterns, the patterns extracted for the non-Xenophobia
class are more associated with positive feelings and emotions or with very little presence
of negative feelings, emotions, or intentions.
The CP6 and CP9 patterns are essential since they show that it is possible to identify
non-xenophobic tweets only through their feelings, emotions, and intentions. A simple
interpretation of the CP6 pattern is that if a tweet has a positive sentiment, its emotion is
joy, and it has very little hate-speech intent. Then, it is most likely a non-xenophobic tweet.
Additionally, we can observe that the absence of the words “foreigners”, “country”,
“illegal”, together with the little or no presence of negative feelings, emotions, and inten-
tions, greatly help classify non-Xenophobia. To conclude, it is important to note how the
word “foreigners” is significant for detecting Xenophobia. By itself, it does not provide
enough information to determine whether or not it is Xenophobia. Still, by contextualizing
it with feelings and emotions, we can discern whether or not the tweet is xenophobic.
On the one hand, the simple absence of the words “foreigners” and “illegal” are
indicators of the non-Xenophobia of the message. While on the other hand, the presence
of the words “foreigners”, “criminal”, “violent”, indicates that the message is more likely
to be classified as xenophobic. The critical thing about contrast patterns is that they are
an excellent opportunity for understanding the process of classifying a message. These
patterns extract helpful characteristics of Xenophobia. With this information, experts
can have a better understanding of xenophobic behavior in social networks, but also by
identifying this type of behavior, possible acts of violence in real life can be prevented [8].

7. Conclusions and Future Work

With the growth of the Internet around the world, people are increasingly connected.
The use of social networks has spread more and more. In turn, this has allowed the increase
in hate speeches on the Internet. Detecting hate speech in social networks has become
an area of great interest for investigation, especially misogyny, racism, sexism. However,
detecting Xenophobia in social networks is a problem that the scientific community has not
sufficiently studied. Due to the insufficient study of Xenophobia in social networks, few
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 22 of 27

databases currently focus on this topic. Additionally, there has been no proposal to deal
with this hate speech using Explainable Artificial Intelligence models. Therefore, in this
paper, our proposal uses contrast pattern-based classifiers to detect Xenophobia in social
networks, specifically on Twitter.
This paper obtains results by using two databases related to Xenophobia, the Pitropakis
Xenophobia Database (PXD) and our proposal, the Experts Xenophobia Database (EXD).
EXD has the main characteristic of being labeled by experts in psychology, sociology, and
international relations. Additionally, this paper compares three of the most popular state-
of-the-art feature representations against our interpretable feature representation proposal
based on keywords, feelings, emotions, and intentions. Furthermore, five of the most
prominent classifiers were used jointly with each of the feature representations mentioned
above for classifying both Xenophobia databases.
From our experimental results, on the one hand, the best Xenophobia classification
results in PXD were obtained using Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF)
as feature representation and PBC4cip as a classifier. On average, TFIDF+PBC4Cip ob-
tained 0.804 in AUC and 0.735 for F1 score with a standard deviation of 0.009 and 0.011,
respectively. However, using our INTER+PBC4cip interpretable proposal, the following
results were obtained on average: 0.794 in AUC and 0.734 in F1 score with a standard
deviation of 0.137 and 0.172, respectively. On the other hand, when EXD was used, the
combination of Bag of Words (BOW) jointly with C45 maximized the results of the F1 score,
while on the other hand, the combination INTER jointly with PBC4cip maximized the
AUC results. On average, BOW+C45 obtained 0.839 in AUC and 0.782 for F1 score with a
standard deviation of 0.013 and 0.014, respectively. In contrast, our interpretable proposal
obtained 0.864 in AUC and 0.768 in the F1 score on average, with a standard deviation of
0.084 and 0.134.
Our experimental results show that the best combinations of feature representa-
tion jointly with an interpretable classifier obtain results on average similar to the non-
interpretable varieties. However, it is essential to mention that combinations such as
TFIDF+PBC4cip or BOW+C45 receive good results for both AUC and F1 scores and are
also quite robust, presenting a small value in their standard deviation. Nevertheless, it is
essential to mention that our interpretable feature representation proposal, jointly with a
contrast pattern-based classifier, is the only combination that produces interpretable results
that experts in the application domain can understand. The use of keywords in conjunction
with feelings, emotions, and intentions helps to contextualize the reasons why a post is
considered xenophobic or not. As Luo et al. mentioned, feature representations based on
numerical transformations are considered black-box; consequently, the results obtained
by using black-box approaches are complicated to be understandable by an expert in the
application area.
After using the same methodology in both databases, our experimental results show
that classifiers trained in EXD obtain better outcomes for both AUC and F1 score metrics
than those trained in PXD. We are confident that our expertly labeled Xenophobia database
is a valuable contribution to dealing with Xenophobia classification on social media. It is
necessary to have more databases focused on Xenophobia to increase the research lines on
this problem. Additionally, having more Xenophobia databases can improve the quality of
future Xenophobia classification models.
In future work, we want to extend this proposal to other social networks such as
Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, among others. For this, a proposal is to increase our
database with entries from other social networks. Each social network has different privacy
policies that make extracting posts from its users complicated; consequently, making it
different research for each social network. Nevertheless, this proposal aims to create a
model that is more adaptable to the classification of Xenophobia in social networks and
can take advantage of the differences in the way of writing of each social network.
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 23 of 27

Author Contributions: Conceptualization, O.L.-G.; methodology, G.I.P.-L. and O.L.-G.; software,

G.I.P.-L., O.L.-G., and M.A.M.-P.; validation, O.L.-G. and M.A.M.-P.; formal analysis, G.I.P.-L.; inves-
tigation, G.I.P.-L.; resources, O.L.-G. and M.A.M.-P.; data curation, O.L.-G. and G.I.P.-L.; writing—
original draft preparation, G.I.P.-L.; writing—review and editing, O.L.-G. and M.A.M.-P.; visual-
ization, G.I.P.-L.; supervision, O.L.-G. and M.A.M.-P.; project administration, G.I.P.-L. and O.L.-
G.; funding acquisition, G.I.P.-L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of
the manuscript.
Funding: This work was partly supported by the National Council of Science and Technology of
Mexico under the scholarship grant 1048425.
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement: Not applicable.
Acknowledgments: We want to especially thank Galo Ben Yair Delgado and Laura Moreno as experts
in International Relations, María José Sanabria and Néstor José Méndez as experts in Psychology, and
Norma Soto as an expert in Sociology, who helped us to label our collected Xenophobia database.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in this manuscript:

NLP Natural Language Processing

XAI Explainable Artificial Intelligence
ML Machine Learning
AUC Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve
SVM Support Vector Machine
NB Naïve–Bayes
GB Gradient Boosting Machine
LR Logistic Regression
EV Ensemble Voting
RNN Recurrent Neural Networks
LSTM Long-Short-Term-Memory
CNN Convolutional Neural Network
sCNN Skipped Convolutional Neural Network
GRU Gated Recurrent Unit
RNN Recurrent Neural Networks
DT Decision Tree
RF Random Forest
KNN k-Nearest Neighbor
RUS Rusboost
UND Under Bagging
PBC4cip Pattern-Based Classifier for Class imbalance problems
WFV Word Frequency Vectorization
CVF Count Vector Features
TFIDF Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency
BOW Bag Of Words
W2V Word To Vec
INTER Interpretable Feature Representation
DOB SCV Distribution Optimally Balanced Stratified Cross-Validation
PXD Pitropakis Xenophobia Database
EXD Experts Xenophobia Database
STD Standard Deviation
AVG Average
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 10801 24 of 27

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