Deep Learning for Multi-Class Antisocial Behavior Identification From Twitter

Social Media has become an integral part of our daily life. Not only it enables collaboration and flow of information but has also become an imperative tool for businesses and governments around the world. All this makes a compelling case for everyone to be on some sort of online social media platform. However, this virtuousness is overshadowed by some of its shortcomings. The manifestation of antisocial behaviour online is a growing concern that hinders participation and cultivates numerous social problems. Antisocial behaviour exists in its various forms such as aggression, disregard for safety, lack of remorse, unlawful behaviour, etc. The paper introduces a deep learning-based approach to detect and classify online antisocial behaviour (ASB). The automatic content classification addresses the issue of scalability, which is imperative when dealing with online platforms. A benchmark dataset was created with multi-class annotation under the supervision of a domain expert. Extensive experiments were conducted with multiple deep learning algorithms and their superior results were validated against the results from the traditional machine learning algorithms. Visually enhanced interpretation of the classification process is presented for model and error analyses. Accuracy of up to 99% in class identification was achieved on the ground truth dataset for empirical validation. The study is an evidence of how the cutting-edge deep learning technology can be utilized to solve a real-world problem of curtailing antisocial behaviour, which is a public health threat and a social problem.