Aggression Identification in Social Media: a Transfer Learning Based Approach

The way people communicate have changed in many ways with the outbreak of social media. One of the aspects of social media is the ability for their information producers to hide, fully or partially, their identity during a discussion; leading to cyber-aggression and interpersonal aggression. Automatically monitoring user-generated content in order to help moderating it is thus a very hot topic. In this paper, we propose to use the transformer based language model BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer) (Devlin et al., 2019) to identify aggressive content. Our model is also used to predict the level of aggressiveness. The evaluation part of this paper is based on the dataset provided by the TRAC shared task (Kumar et al., 2018a). When compared to the other participants of this shared task, our model achieved the third best performance according to the weighted F1 measure on both Facebook and Twitter collections.