Hateful Comment Detection and Hate Target Type Prediction for Video Comments

With the widespread increase in hateful content on the web, hate detection has become more crucial than ever. Although vast literature exists on hate detection from text, images and videos, interestingly, there has been no previous work on hateful comment detection (HCD) from video pages. HCD is critical for comment moderation and for flagging controversial videos. Comments are often short, contextual and convoluted making the problem challenging. Toward solving this problem, we contribute a dataset, HateComments, consisting of 2071 comments for 401 videos obtained from two popular video sharing platforms. We investigate two related tasks: binary HCD and 4-class multi-label hate target-type prediction (HTP). We systematically explore the importance of various forms of context for effective HCD. Our initial experiments show that our best method which leverages rich video context (like description, transcript and visual input) leads to an HCD accuracy of ~78.6% and an ROC AUC score of ~0.61 for HTP. Code and data is at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EUbWDUokv1CYkWKlwByUC6yIuBGUw2MN/.