Augment to prevent: Short-text data augmentation in deep learning for hate-speech classification

In this paper, we address the issue of augmenting text data in supervised Natural Language Processing problems, exemplified by deep online hate speech classification. A great challenge in this domain is that although the presence of hate speech can be deleterious to the quality of service provided by social platforms, it still comprises only a tiny fraction of the content that can be found online, which can lead to performance deterioration due to majority class overfitting. To this end, we perform a thorough study on the application of deep learning to the hate speech detection problem: a) we propose three text-based data augmentation techniques aimed at reducing the degree of class imbalance and to maximise the amount of information we can extract from our limited resources and b) we apply them on a selection of top-performing deep architectures and hate speech databases in order to showcase their generalisation properties. The data augmentation techniques are based on a) synonym replacement based on word embedding vector closeness, b) warping of the word tokens along the padded sequence or c) class-conditional, recurrent neural language generation. Our proposed framework yields a significant increase in multi-class hate speech detection, outperforming the baseline in the largest online hate speech database by an absolute 5.7 % increase in Macro-F1 score and 30 % in hate speech class recall.