Hiding in Plain Sight: Tweets with Hate Speech Masked by Homoglyphs

Portia Cooper, Mihai Surdeanu, Eduardo Blanco

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

To avoid detection by current NLP monitoring applications, progenitors of hate speech often replace one or more letters in offensive words with homoglyphs, visually similar Unicode characters. Harvesting real-world hate speech containing homoglyphs is challenging due to the vast replacement possibilities. We developed a character substitution scraping method and assembled the Offensive Tweets with Homoglyphs (OTH) Dataset (N=90,788) with more than 1.5 million occurrences of 1,281 non-Latin characters (emojis excluded). In an annotated sample (n=700), 40.14% of the tweets were found to contain hate speech. We assessed the performance of seven transformer-based hate speech detection models and found that they performed poorly in a zero-shot setting (F1 scores between 0.04 and 0.52), but normalizing the data dramatically improved detection (F1 scores between 0.59 and 0.71). Training the models using the annotated data further boosted performance (highest micro-averaged F1 score=0.88, using five-fold cross validation). This study indicates that a dataset containing homoglyphs known and unknown to the scraping script can be collected, and that neural models can be trained to recognize camouflaged real-world hate speech.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationEMNLP 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages2922-2929
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9798891760615
StatePublished - 2023
Event2023 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: Dec 6 2023Dec 10 2023

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Conference

Conference2023 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period12/6/2312/10/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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