Cyberbullying Text Identification: A Deep Learning and Transformer-based Language Modeling Approach

In the contemporary digital age, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube serve as vital channels for individuals to express ideas and connect with others. Despite fostering increased connectivity, these platforms have inadvertently given rise to negative behaviors, particularly cyberbullying. While extensive research has been conducted on high-resource languages such as English, there is a notable scarcity of resources for low-resource languages like Bengali, Arabic, Tamil, etc., particularly in terms of language modeling. This study addresses this gap by developing a cyberbullying text identification system called BullyFilterNeT tailored for social media texts, considering Bengali as a test case. The intelligent BullyFilterNeT system devised overcomes Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) challenges associated with non-contextual embeddings and addresses the limitations of context-aware feature representations. To facilitate a comprehensive understanding, three non-contextual embedding models GloVe, FastText, and Word2Vec are developed for feature extraction in Bengali. These embedding models are utilized in the classification models, employing three statistical models (SVM, SGD, Libsvm), and four deep learning models (CNN, VDCNN, LSTM, GRU). Additionally, the study employs six transformer-based language models: mBERT, bELECTRA, IndicBERT, XML-RoBERTa, DistilBERT, and BanglaBERT, respectively to overcome the limitations of earlier models. Remarkably, BanglaBERT-based BullyFilterNeT achieves the highest accuracy of 88.04% in our test set, underscoring its effectiveness in cyberbullying text identification in the Bengali language. Copyright © 2024 K. Saifullah et al., licensed to EAI. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited.