Ensemble-based Semi-Supervised Learning for Hate Speech Detection

Abstract

Large and accurately labeled textual corpora are vital to developing efficient hate speech classifiers. This paper introduces an ensemble-based semi-supervised learning approach to leverage the availability of abundant social media content. Starting with a reliable hate speech dataset, we train and test diverse classifiers that are then used to label a corpus of one million tweets. Next, we investigate several strategies to select the most confident labels from the obtained pseudo labels. We assess these strategies by re-training all the classifiers with the seed dataset augmented with the trusted pseudo-labeled data. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach improves classification performance over supervised hate speech classification methods.