Sentiment informed cyberbullying detection in social media

Cyberbullying is a phenomenon which negatively affects individuals. Victims of the cyberbullying suffer from a range of mental issues, ranging from depression to low self-esteem. Due to the advent of the social media platforms, cyberbullying is becoming more and more prevalent. Traditional mechanisms to fight against cyberbullying include use of standards and guidelines, human moderators, use of blacklists based on profane words, and regular expressions to manually detect cyberbullying. However, these mechanisms fall short in social media and do not scale well. Users in social media use intentional evasive expressions like, obfuscation of abusive words, which necessitates the development of a sophisticated learning framework to automatically detect new cyberbullying behaviors. Cyberbullying detection in social media is a challenging task due to short, noisy and unstructured content and intentional obfuscation of the abusive words or phrases by social media users. Motivated by sociological and psychological findings on bullying behavior and its correlation with emotions, we propose to leverage the sentiment information to accurately detect cyberbullying behavior in social media by proposing an effective optimization framework. Experimental results on two real-world social media datasets show the superiority of the proposed framework. Further studies validate the effectiveness of leveraging sentiment information for cyberbullying detection.