Detecting Hate Speech and Offensive Language on Twitter using Machine Learning: An N-gram and TFIDF based Approach

Toxic online content has become a major issue in today's world due to an exponential increase in the use of internet by people of different cultures and educational background. Differentiating hate speech and offensive language is a key challenge in automatic detection of toxic text content. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically classify tweets on Twitter into three classes: hateful, offensive and clean. Using Twitter dataset, we perform experiments considering n-grams as features and passing their term frequency-inverse document frequency (TFIDF) values to multiple machine learning models. We perform comparative analysis of the models considering several values of n in n-grams and TFIDF normalization methods. After tuning the model giving the best results, we achieve 95.6% accuracy upon evaluating it on test data. We also create a module which serves as an intermediate between user and Twitter.