Improving Hate Speech Detection of Urdu Tweets Using Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis is a technique that is being used abundantly nowadays for customer reviews analysis, popularity analysis of electoral candidates, hate speech detection and similar applications. Sentiment analysis on tweets encounters challenges such as highly skewed classes, high dimensional feature vectors and highly sparse data. In this study, we have analyzed the improvement achieved by successively addressing these problems in order to determine their severity for sentiment analysis of tweets. Firstly, we prepared a comprehensive data set consisting of Urdu Tweets for sentiment analysis-based hate speech detection. To improve the performance of the sentiment classifier, we employed dynamic stop words filtering, Variable Global Feature Selection Scheme (VGFSS) and Synthetic Minority Optimization Technique (SMOTE) to handle the sparsity, dimensionality and class imbalance problems respectively. We used two machine learning algorithms i.e., Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Multinomial Naïve Bayes' (MNB) for investigating performance in our experiments. Our results show that addressing class skew along with alleviating the high dimensionality problem brings about the maximum improvement in the overall performance of the sentiment analysis-based hate speech detection.