INF-HatEval at SemEval-2019 Task 5: Convolutional Neural Networks for Hate Speech Detection Against Women and Immigrants on Twitter

In this paper, we describe our approach to detect hate speech against women and immigrants on Twitter in a multilingual context, English and Spanish. This challenge was proposed by the SemEval-2019 Task 5, where participants should develop models for hate speech detection, a two-class classification where systems have to predict whether a tweet in English or in Spanish with a given target (women or immigrants) is hateful or not hateful (Task A), and whether the hate speech is directed at a specific person or a group of individuals (Task B). For this, we implemented a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) using pre-trained word embeddings (GloVe and FastText) with 300 dimensions. Our proposed model obtained in Task A 0.488 and 0.696 F1-score for English and Spanish, respectively. For Task B, the CNN obtained 0.297 and 0.430 EMR for English and Spanish, respectively.