Using Machine Learning to Detect Cyberbullying

Cyber bullying is the use of technology as a medium to bully someone. Although it has been an issue for many years, the recognition of its impact on young people has recently increased. Social networking sites provide a fertile medium for bullies, and teens and young adults who use these sites are vulnerable to attacks. Through machine learning, we can detect language patterns used by bullies and their victims, and develop rules to automatically detect cyber bullying content. The data we used for our project was collected from the website Formspring.me, a question-and-answer formatted website that contains a high percentage of bullying content. The data was labeled using a web service, Amazon's Mechanical Turk. We used the labeled data, in conjunction with machine learning techniques provided by the Weka tool kit, to train a computer to recognize bullying content. Both a C4.5 decision tree learner and an instance-based learner were able to identify the true positives with 78.5% accuracy.