Hierarchical attention networks for cyberbullying detection on the instagram social network

Lu Cheng, Ruocheng Guo, Yasin Silva, Deborah Hall, Huan Liu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

66 Scopus citations

Abstract

Cyberbullying has become one of the most pressing online risks for young people and has raised serious concerns in society. The emerging literature identifies cyberbullying as repetitive acts that occur over time rather than one-off incidents. Yet, there has been relatively little work to model the hierarchical structure of social media sessions and the temporal dynamics of cyberbullying in online social network sessions. We propose a hierarchical attention network for cyberbullying detection that takes these aspects of cyberbullying into account. The primary distinctive characteristics of our approach include: (i) a hierarchical structure that mirrors the structure of a social media session; (ii) levels of attention mechanisms applied at the word and comment level, thereby enabling the model to pay different amounts of attention to words and comments, depending on the context; and (iii) a cyberbullying detection task that also predicts the interval of time between two adjacent comments. These characteristics allow the model to exploit the commonalities and differences across these two tasks to improve the performance of cyberbullying detection. Experiments on a real-world dataset from Instagram, the social media platform on which the highest percentage of users have reported experiencing cyberbullying, reveal that the proposed architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art method.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIAM International Conference on Data Mining, SDM 2019
PublisherSociety for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Publications
Pages235-243
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781611975673
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Event19th SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, SDM 2019 - Calgary, Canada
Duration: May 2 2019May 4 2019

Publication series

NameSIAM International Conference on Data Mining, SDM 2019

Conference

Conference19th SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, SDM 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityCalgary
Period5/2/195/4/19

Keywords

  • Cyberbullying
  • Hierarchical attention network
  • Social media

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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