# AI Enabled User-Specific Cyberbullying Severity Detection with Explainability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10650 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10650/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [The Mythos of Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03490/) (2016)
- [A Survey of the State of Explainable AI for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00711/) (2020)
- [Towards Explainable NLP: A Generative Explanation Framework for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00196/) (2018)
- [Explainable AI: current status and future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07045/) (2021)
- [Automatic Detection of Cyberbullying in Social Media Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05617/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Toxic Comment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09957/) (2018)
- [Improving Cyberbully Detection with User Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00449/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rise of social media has significantly increased the prevalence of cyberbullying (CB), posing serious risks to both mental and physical well-being. Effective detection systems are essential for mitigating its impact. While several machine learning (ML) models have been developed, few incorporate victims' psychological, demographic, and behavioral factors alongside bullying comments to assess severity. In this study, we propose an AI model intregrating user-specific attributes, including psychological factors (self-esteem, anxiety, depression), online behavior (internet usage, disciplinary history), and demographic attributes (race, gender, ethnicity), along with social media comments. Additionally, we introduce a re-labeling technique that categorizes social media comments into three severity levels: Not Bullying, Mild Bullying, and Severe Bullying, considering user-specific factors.Our LSTM model is trained using 146 features, incorporating emotional, topical, and word2vec representations of social media comments as well as user-level attributes and it outperforms existing baseline models, achieving the highest accuracy of 98% and an F1-score of 0.97. To identify key factors influencing the severity of cyberbullying, we employ explainable AI techniques (SHAP and LIME) to interpret the model's decision-making process. Our findings reveal that, beyond hate comments, victims belonging to specific racial and gender groups are more frequently targeted and exhibit higher incidences of depression, disciplinary issues, and low self-esteem. Additionally, individuals with a prior history of bullying are at a greater risk of becoming victims of cyberbullying.