Trawling for Trolling: A Dataset

The ability to accurately detect and filter offensive content automatically is important to ensure a rich and diverse digital discourse. Trolling is a type of hurtful or offensive content that is prevalent in social media, but is underrepresented in datasets for offensive content detection. In this work, we present a dataset that models trolling as a subcategory of offensive content. The dataset was created by collecting samples from well-known datasets and reannotating them along precise definitions of different categories of offensive content. The dataset has 12,490 samples, split across 5 classes; Normal, Profanity, Trolling, Derogatory and Hate Speech. It encompasses content from Twitter, Reddit and Wikipedia Talk Pages. Models trained on our dataset show appreciable performance without any significant hyperparameter tuning and can potentially learn meaningful linguistic information effectively. We find that these models are sensitive to data ablation which suggests that the dataset is largely devoid of spurious statistical artefacts that could otherwise distract and confuse classification models.