Abstract

The rise of social networks has allowed misogynistic, xenophobic, and homophobic people to spread their hate-speech to intimidate individuals or groups because of their gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The consequences of hate-speech are devastating, causing severe depression and even leading people to commit suicide. Hate-speech identification is challenging as the large amount of daily publications makes it impossible to review every comment by hand. Moreover, hate-speech is also spread by hoaxes that requires language and context understanding. With the aim of reducing the number of comments that should be reviewed by experts, or even for the development of autonomous systems, the automatic identification of hate-speech has gained academic relevance. However, the reliability of automatic approaches is still limited specifically in languages other than English, in which some of the state-of-the-art techniques have not been analyzed in detail. In this work, we examine which features are most effective in identifying hate-speech in Spanish and how these features can be combined to develop more accurate systems. In addition, we characterize the language present in each type of hate-speech by means of explainable linguistic features and compare our results with state-of-the-art approaches. Our research indicates that combining linguistic features and transformers by means of knowledge integration outperforms current solutions regarding hate-speech identification in Spanish.

Details

Title
Evaluating feature combination strategies for hate-speech detection in Spanish using linguistic features and transformers
Author
García-Díaz, José Antonio 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Jiménez-Zafra, Salud María 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; García-Cumbreras, Miguel Angel 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Valencia-García, Rafael 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Universidad de Murcia, Facultad de Informática, Murcia, Spain (GRID:grid.10586.3a) (ISNI:0000 0001 2287 8496) 
 Universidad de Jaén, Computer Science Department, SINAI, CEATIC, Jaén, Spain (GRID:grid.21507.31) (ISNI:0000 0001 2096 9837) 
Pages
2893-2914
Publication year
2023
Publication date
Jun 2023
Publisher
Springer Nature B.V.
ISSN
21994536
e-ISSN
21986053
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2825544335
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2022. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.