Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages
The large fraction of hate speech and other offensive and objectionable content online poses a huge challenge to societies. Offensive language such as insulting, hurtful, derogatory or obscene content directed from one person to another person and open for others undermines objective discussions. Such type of language can be more increasingly found on the web and can lead to the radicalization of debates. Public opinion forming requires rational critical discourse (Habermas 1984). Objectionable content can pose a threat to democracy. At the same time, open societies need to find an adequate way to react to such content without imposing rigid censorship regimes. As a consequence, many platforms of social media websites monitor user posts. This leads to a pressing demand for methods to automatically identify suspicious posts. Online communities, social media enterprises and technology companies have been investing heavily in technology and processes to identify offensive language in order to prevent abusive behavior in social media.