In this paper, we describe our efforts at OSACT Shared Task on Offensive Language Detection. The shared task consists of two subtasks: offensive language detection (Subtask A) and hate speech detection (Subtask B). For offensive language detection, a system combination of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieved the best results on development set, which ranked 1st in the official results for Subtask A with F1-score of 90.51% on the test set. For hate speech detection, DNNs were less effective and a system combination of multiple SVMs with different parameters achieved the best results on development set, which ranked 4th in official results for Subtask B with F1-macro score of 80.63% on the test set.

Access to social media often enables users to engage in conversation with limited accountability. This allows a user to share their opinions and ideology, especially regarding public content, occasionally adopting offensive language. This may encourage hate crimes or cause mental harm to targeted individuals or groups. Hence, it is important to detect offensive comments in social media platforms. Typically, most studies focus on offensive commenting in one platform only, even though the problem of offensive language is observed across multiple platforms. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce and make publicly available a new dialectal Arabic news comment dataset, collected from multiple social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. We follow two-step crowd-annotator selection criteria for low-representative language annotation task in a crowdsourcing platform. Furthermore, we analyze the distinctive lexical content along with the use of emojis in offensive comments. We train and evaluate the classifiers using the annotated multi-platform dataset along with other publicly available data. Our results highlight the importance of multiple platform dataset for (a) cross-platform, (b) cross-domain, and (c) cross-dialect generalization of classifier performance.

In a bid to reach a larger and more diverse audience, Twitter users often post parallel tweets—tweets that contain the same content but are written in different languages. Parallel tweets can be an important resource for developing machine translation (MT) systems among other natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we introduce a generic method for collecting parallel tweets. Using this method, we collect a bilingual corpus of English-Arabic parallel tweets and a list of Twitter accounts who post English-Arabictweets regularly. Since our method is generic, it can also be used for collecting parallel tweets that cover less-resourced languages such as Serbian and Urdu. Additionally, we annotate a subset of Twitter accounts with their countries of origin and topic of interest, which provides insights about the population who post parallel tweets. This latter information can also be useful for author profiling tasks.