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Automatic detection of cyberbullying in social media text

Author

Listed:
  • Cynthia Van Hee
  • Gilles Jacobs
  • Chris Emmery
  • Bart Desmet
  • Els Lefever
  • Ben Verhoeven
  • Guy De Pauw
  • Walter Daelemans
  • Véronique Hoste

Abstract

While social media offer great communication opportunities, they also increase the vulnerability of young people to threatening situations online. Recent studies report that cyberbullying constitutes a growing problem among youngsters. Successful prevention depends on the adequate detection of potentially harmful messages and the information overload on the Web requires intelligent systems to identify potential risks automatically. The focus of this paper is on automatic cyberbullying detection in social media text by modelling posts written by bullies, victims, and bystanders of online bullying. We describe the collection and fine-grained annotation of a cyberbullying corpus for English and Dutch and perform a series of binary classification experiments to determine the feasibility of automatic cyberbullying detection. We make use of linear support vector machines exploiting a rich feature set and investigate which information sources contribute the most for the task. Experiments on a hold-out test set reveal promising results for the detection of cyberbullying-related posts. After optimisation of the hyperparameters, the classifier yields an F1 score of 64% and 61% for English and Dutch respectively, and considerably outperforms baseline systems.

Suggested Citation

  • Cynthia Van Hee & Gilles Jacobs & Chris Emmery & Bart Desmet & Els Lefever & Ben Verhoeven & Guy De Pauw & Walter Daelemans & Véronique Hoste, 2018. "Automatic detection of cyberbullying in social media text," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(10), pages 1-22, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0203794
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0203794
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Van Royen, Kathleen & Poels, Karolien & Vandebosch, Heidi, 2016. "Harmonizing freedom and protection: Adolescents' voices on automatic monitoring of social networking sites," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 35-41.
    2. Scott Deerwester & Susan T. Dumais & George W. Furnas & Thomas K. Landauer & Richard Harshman, 1990. "Indexing by latent semantic analysis," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 41(6), pages 391-407, September.
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Silvia Gabrielli & Silvia Rizzi & Sara Carbone & Enrico Maria Piras, 2021. "School Interventions for Bullying–Cyberbullying Prevention in Adolescents: Insights from the UPRIGHT and CREEP Projects," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(21), pages 1-13, November.
    2. Carlos Carrasco-Farré, 2022. "The fingerprints of misinformation: how deceptive content differs from reliable sources in terms of cognitive effort and appeal to emotions," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-18, December.
    3. Xieling Chen & Di Zou & Haoran Xie & Gary Cheng, 2021. "A Topic-Based Bibliometric Review of Computers in Human Behavior: Contributors, Collaborations, and Research Topics," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(9), pages 1-21, April.
    4. Amgad Muneer & Suliman Mohamed Fati, 2020. "A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Techniques for Cyberbullying Detection on Twitter," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 12(11), pages 1-20, October.
    5. Daniel Falla & Rosario Ortega-Ruiz & Eva M. Romera, 2021. "Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Transition from Cybergossip to Cyberaggression: A Longitudinal Study," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(3), pages 1-12, January.
    6. Laura R. Persky & Janet L. Walsh & Ken Pinnock, 2023. "Creating Positive Workplace Culture To Reduce Workplace Bullying," Global Journal of Business Research, The Institute for Business and Finance Research, vol. 17(1), pages 43-53.
    7. Shuaa A. Aljasir & Maisoon O. Alsebaei, 2022. "Cyberbullying and cybervictimization on digital media platforms: the role of demographic variables and parental mediation strategies," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-9, December.
    8. Jinyu Huang & Zhaohao Zhong & Haoyuan Zhang & Liping Li, 2021. "Cyberbullying in Social Media and Online Games among Chinese College Students and Its Associated Factors," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(9), pages 1-12, April.

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