Detecting Hate Speech on the World Wide Web

We present an approach to detecting hate speech in online text, where hate speech is defined as abusive speech targeting specific group characteristics, such as ethnic origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. While hate speech against any group may exhibit some common characteristics, we have observed that hatred against each different group is typically characterized by the use of a small set of high frequency stereotypical words; however, such words may be used in either a positive or a negative sense, making our task similar to that of words sense disambiguation. In this paper we describe our definition of hate speech, the collection and annotation of our hate speech corpus, and a mechanism for detecting some commonly used methods of evading common “dirty word” filters. We describe pilot classification experiments in which we classify anti-semitic speech reaching an accuracy 94%, precision of 68% and recall at 60%, for an F1 measure of .6375.