# Neural Models for Offensive Language Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14609 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14609/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4053/) (2014)
- [How to Fine-Tune BERT for Text Classification?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05583/) (2019)
- [CNN Features off-the-shelf: an Astounding Baseline for Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6382/) (2014)
- [Predicting the Type and Target of Offensive Posts in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09666/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2019 Task 6: Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media (OffensEval)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08983/) (2019)
- [HateBERT: Retraining BERT for Abusive Language Detection in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12472/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 12: Multilingual Offensive Language Identification in Social Media (OffensEval 2020)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07235/) (2020)
- [SOLID: A Large-Scale Semi-Supervised Dataset for Offensive Language Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14454/) (2020)
- [Galileo at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Multi-lingual Learning for Offensive Language Identification using Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03542/) (2020)
- [UHH-LT at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Fine-Tuning of Pre-Trained Transformer Networks for Offensive Language Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11493/) (2020)
- [GUIR at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Domain-Tuned Contextualized Models for Offensive Language Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14477/) (2020)
- [KEIS@JUST at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Identifying Multilingual Offensive Tweets Using Weighted Ensemble and Fine-Tuned BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07820/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Offensive language detection is an ever-growing natural language processing (NLP) application. This growth is mainly because of the widespread usage of social networks, which becomes a mainstream channel for people to communicate, work, and enjoy entertainment content. Many incidents of sharing aggressive and offensive content negatively impacted society to a great extend. We believe contributing to improving and comparing different machine learning models to fight such harmful contents is an important and challenging goal for this thesis. We targeted the problem of offensive language detection for building efficient automated models for offensive language detection. With the recent advancements of NLP models, specifically, the Transformer model, which tackled many shortcomings of the standard seq-to-seq techniques. The BERT model has shown state-of-the-art results on many NLP tasks. Although the literature still exploring the reasons for the BERT achievements in the NLP field. Other efficient variants have been developed to improve upon the standard BERT, such as RoBERTa and ALBERT. Moreover, due to the multilingual nature of text on social media that could affect the model decision on a given tween, it is becoming essential to examine multilingual models such as XLM-RoBERTa trained on 100 languages and how did it compare to unilingual models. The RoBERTa based model proved to be the most capable model and achieved the highest F1 score for the tasks. Another critical aspect of a well-rounded offensive language detection system is the speed at which a model can be trained and make inferences. In that respect, we have considered the model run-time and fine-tuned the very efficient implementation of FastText called BlazingText that achieved good results, which is much faster than BERT-based models.