Aggressive Language Detection Using VGCN-BERT for Spanish Texts

Abstract

The increasing influence from users in social media has made that aggressive content disseminates over the internet. To tackle this problem, recent advances in Aggressive Language Detection have demonstrated a good performance of Deep Learning techniques. Recently Transformer based architectures such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) outperformed previous aggressive text detection baselines. However, most of the Transformers-based approaches are unable to properly capture global information such as language vocabulary. Thus, in this work, we focus on aggressive content detection using the combination of Vocabulary Graph Convolutional Network (VGCN) to capture global information and BERT to model local information. This combined approach called VGCN-BERT allows us to improve the feature level representation in Spanish aggressive language detection. Our experiments were performed on a benchmark called MEX-A3T aggressiveness dataset which is composed of aggressive and non-aggressive Tweets written in the Mexican Spanish variant. We report 86.46% in terms of F1-score using this VGCN-BERT approach which allows us to obtain comparable results with the current state-of-the-art, ensemble BERT, so as to detect aggressive content regarding the track MEX-A3T 2020.

This research was supported by National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development and Innovation (Fondecyt-Perú) within the framework of the “Project of 50 E038-2019-01-BM Improvement and Expansion of the Services of the National System of Science, Technology and Technological Innovation” [Grant 028-2019-FONDECYT-BM-INC.INV].