Hate Speech Detection with Machine Learning

Coursesteach
4 min readApr 21, 2024

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Introduction

Hate speech poses a significant challenge on popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, with many posts containing hateful content often originating from individuals with strong political viewpoints. If you’re interested in learning how to develop a hate speech detection model using machine learning, this article is tailored for you. Throughout this piece, I’ll guide you through the process of building a hate speech detection system using Python.

Defining hate speech can be complex, as it often involves subjective interpretation and can vary across different contexts. However, the United Nations broadly defines hate speech as any form of verbal, written, or behavioral communication that targets or employs discriminatory language against individuals or groups based on their identity, including factors such as religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, color, ancestry, gender, or other identity markers.

Now that we have a clearer understanding of what constitutes hate speech, it’s evident that social media platforms play a crucial role in detecting and preventing its dissemination. In the following sections, I’ll delve into the process of hate speech detection using machine learning techniques in the Python programming language. Join me as we explore this important aspect of moderating online discourse and promoting a safer digital environment.

📚Sections

Introduction
import Libraries
Data Preprocessing
Data Splitting
Model training.
Model testing.

📚 Import Libraries

Hate Speech Detection using Python

The dataset I’m using for the hate speech detection task is downloaded from Kaggle. This dataset was originally collected from Twitter and contains the following columns:

  • index
  • count
  • hate_speech
  • offensive_language
  • neither
  • class
  • tweet
!pip install nltk

NLTK, or Natural Language Toolkit, is a comprehensive library in Python for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 50 corpora and lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning. Some key functionalities of NLTK include:

from nltk.util import pr
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeClassifier
import re
import nltk
stemmer = nltk.SnowballStemmer("english")
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
import string
nltk.download('stopwords')
stopword=set(stopwords.words('english'))

📚Data Loading


from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')
data = pd.read_csv("/content/drive/MyDrive/Datasets (1)/Hate Speech/twitter.csv")
print(data.head())

📚Data Preprocessing

Now I will create a function to clean the texts in the tweet column:

def clean(text):
text = str(text).lower()
text = re.sub('
', '', text)
text = re.sub('https?://\S+|www\.\S+', '', text)
text = re.sub('<.*?>+', '', text)
text = re.sub('[%s]' % re.escape(string.punctuation), '', text)
text = re.sub('\n', '', text)
text = re.sub('\w*\d\w*', '', text)
text = [word for word in text.split(' ') if word not in stopword]
text=" ".join(text)
text = [stemmer.stem(word) for word in text.split(' ')]
text=" ".join(text)
return text
data["tweet"] = data["tweet"].apply(clean)
data

📚Data Splitting

Now let’s split the dataset into training and test sets and train a machine learning model for the task of hate speech detection:

x = np.array(data["tweet"])
y = np.array(data["hate_speech"])

cv = CountVectorizer()
X = cv.fit_transform(x) # Fit the Data
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.33, random_state=42)

📚Model Training

clf = DecisionTreeClassifier()
clf.fit(X_train,y_train)

📚Model testing

y_pred_DT = clf.predict(X_test)
DT_Acc=clf.score(X_test, y_test)
print('Accuracy score= {:.4f}'.format(clf.score(X_test, y_test)))
#Accuracy score= 0.7409

Now let’s test this machine learning model to see if it detects hate speech or not:

sample = "Let's unite and kill all the people who are protesting against the government"
data = cv.transform([sample]).toarray()
print(clf.predict(data))

Github

Here you can find the complete code of project

Link of Github

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References

Hate Speech Detection with Machine Learning

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