Explainable and High-Performance Hate and Offensive Speech Detection

The spread of information through social media platforms can create environments possibly hostile to vulnerable communities and silence certain groups in society. To mitigate such instances, several models have been developed to detect hate and offensive speech. Since detecting hate and offensive speech in social media platforms could incorrectly exclude individuals from social media platforms, which can reduce trust, there is a need to create explainable and interpretable models. Thus, we build an explainable and interpretable high performance model based on the XGBoost algorithm, trained on Twitter data. For unbalanced Twitter data, XGboost outperformed the LSTM, AutoGluon, and ULMFiT models on hate speech detection with an F1 score of 0.75 compared to 0.38 and 0.37, and 0.38 respectively. When we down-sampled the data to three separate classes of approximately 5000 tweets, XGBoost performed better than LSTM, AutoGluon, and ULMFiT; with F1 scores for hate speech detection of 0.79 vs 0.69, 0.77, and 0.66 respectively. XGBoost also performed better than LSTM, AutoGluon, and ULMFiT in the down-sampled version for offensive speech detection with F1 score of 0.83 vs 0.88, 0.82, and 0.79 respectively. We use Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) on our XGBoost models' outputs to makes it explainable and interpretable compared to LSTM, AutoGluon and ULMFiT that are black-box models.