Convolutional neural networks for toxic comment classification

Flood of information is produced in a daily basis through the global internet usage arising from the online interactive communications among users. While this situation contributes significantly to the quality of human life, unfortunately it involves enormous dangers, since online texts with high toxicity can cause personal attacks, online harassment and bullying behaviors. This has triggered both industrial and research community in the last few years while there are several attempts to identify an efficient model for online toxic comment prediction. However, these steps are still in their infancy and new approaches and frameworks are required. On parallel, the data explosion that appears constantly, makes the construction of new machine learning computational tools for managing this information, an imperative need. Thankfully advances in hardware, cloud computing and big data management allow the development of Deep Learning approaches appearing very promising performance so far. For text classification in particular the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have recently been proposed approaching text analytics in a modern manner emphasizing in the structure of words in a document. In this work, we employ this approach to discover toxic comments in a large pool of documents provided by a current Kaggle’s competition regarding Wikipedia’s talk page edits. To justify this decision we choose to compare CNNs against the traditional bag-of-words approach for text analysis combined with a selection of algorithms proven to be very effective in text classification. The reported results provide enough evidence that CNN enhance toxic comment classification reinforcing research interest towards this direction. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.