sthruggle at SemEval-2019 Task 5: An Ensemble Approach to Hate Speech Detection
In this paper, we present our approach to detection of hate speech against women and immigrants in tweets for our participation in the SemEval-2019 Task 5. We trained an SVM and an RF classifier using character bi- and trigram features and a BiLSTM pre-initialized with external word embeddings. We combined the predictions of the SVM, RF and BiLSTM in two different ensemble models. The first was a majority vote of the binary values, and the second used the average of the confidence scores. For development, we got the highest accuracy (75{\%}) by the final ensemble model with majority voting. For testing, all models scored substantially lower and the scores between the classifiers varied more. We believe that these large differences between the higher accuracies in the development phase and the lower accuracies we obtained in the testing phase have partly to do with differences between the training, development and testing data.
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