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Overview of the HASOC track at FIRE 2019:
Hate Speech and Offensive Content
Identification in Indo-European Languages
Sandip Modha1,4[0000−0003−2427−2433], Thomas Mandl2,3[0000−0002−8398−9699],
Prasenjit Majumder3, and Daksh Patel4
1 DA-IICT,Gandhinagar,India sjmodha@gmail.com
2 University of Hildesheim, Germany mandl@uni-hildesheim.de
3 DA-IICT,Gandhinagar,India prasenjit.majumder@gmail.com
4 LDRP-ITR,Gandhinagar,India dakshpatel68@gmail.com
Abstract. The identification of Hate Speech in Social Media has re-
ceived much attention in research recently. There is a particular demand
for research for languages other than English. The first edition of the
HASOC track creates resources for Hate Speech Identification in Hindi,
German, and English. Three datasets were developed from Twitter, and
Facebook and made available. HASOC intends to stimulate research and
development for Hate Speech classification for different languages. The
datasets allow the development and testing of supervised machine learn-
ing systems. Binary classification and more fine-grained sub-classes were
offered in 3 sub tasks. For all sub-tasks, 321 experiments were submitted.
For the classification task, models based on deep learning methods have
proved to be adequate. The approaches used most often were Long-Short-
Term memory (LSTM) networks with distributed word representation of
the text. The performance of the best system for identification of Hate
Speech for English, Hindi, and German was a Marco-F1 score of 0.78,
0.81, and 0.61, respectively. This overview provides details insights and
analyzes the results.
Keywords: Hate Speech · Text Classification · Evaluation· Deep Learn-
ing.
1 Introduction
The large fraction of Hate Speech and other offensive and objectionable content
online poses a huge challenge to societies. Offensive language such as insulting,
hurtful, derogatory, or obscene content directed from one person to another per-
son and open for others undermines objective discussions. There is a growing
need for research on the classification of Hate Speech into different categories
of offensive content on different platforms of social media without human assis-
tance.
Copyright c©2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Com-
mons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). FIRE 2019, 12-15 Decem-
ber 2019, Kolkata, India.
S. Modha et al.
In October 2019, the European Court of Justice decided that platforms need
to take down content worldwide even after national decisions. In a particular
case, the EU court debated defamatory posts on Facebook. Even posts similar in
tone need to be addressed and the ruling explicitly mentions automatic systems.
This shows that automatic systems are of high social relevance. Recently, also
the founder of Facebook proposed ideas for the regulation of the Internet. He
demanded standards and baselines for the definition of harmful content. Such
clear definitions have not been provided and are unlikely to be developed in the
near future. This makes research and annotated corpora even more necessary.
The identification of Hate Speech within a collection or a stream of tweets
is a challenging task because systems cannot rely on the text content. Based
on content, text classification systems have been successful. However, Hate text
might have many issues. Hate often has no clear signal words, and word lists, as
in sentiment analysis, are expected to work less well.
In order to contribute to this research, w this overview paper presents the
1st edition of HASOC Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-
European Languages, namely: German, English, and Hindi. The dataset for
all three languages was created from Twitter and Facebook. HASOC consists
of three tasks, a coarse-grained binary classification task, and two fine-grained
multi-class classifications. Of course, freedom of speech needs to be guaranteed
in democratic societies for future development. Nevertheless, the offensive text
which hurts others’ sentiments needs to be restricted. As there is such an in-
crease in the usage of abuse on many internet platforms, technological support
for the recognition of such posts is necessary. The use of supervised learning with
the annotated dataset is a key strategy for advancing such systems. There has
been significant work in several languages in particular for English. However,
there is a lack of research on this recent and relevant topic for most other lan-
guages. This track intends to develop data and evaluation resources for several
languages. The objectives are to stimulate research for these languages and to
find out the quality of hate speech detection technology in other languages.
The HASOC dataset provides several thousands labeled social media posts
for each language. The entire dataset was annotated and checked by the orga-
nizers of the track. The annotation architecture is designed to create data for 3
different sub tasks.
1. SUB-TASK A: classification of Hate Speech (HOF) and non-offensive con-
tent.
2. SUB-TASK B: If the post is HOF, sub-task B is used to identify the type of
hate.
3. SUB-TASK C: it decides the target of the post.
Hate Speech detection is of great significance and attracting many researchers.
Recent overview papers provide a good introduction to the scientific issues that
are involved in Hate Speech identification [12,36].
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/technology/facebook-europe.html
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/diginomics/facebook-ceo-zuckerberg-ideas-
to-regulate-the-internet-16116032.html
HASOC 2019 Overview
2 Related Forum and Dataset
Collections are an important asset for any supervised classification methods.
For Hate Speech, several previous initiatives have created corpora that have
been used for research. There has been significant work in several languages,
in particular for English. However, for other languages, such as Hindi standard
datasets are not available and HASOC is an attempt to create the labeled dataset
for such low resource language. HASOC is primarily inspired by two previous
evaluation forums, GermEval [44], and OffensEval [47], and tries to leverage the
synergies of these initiatives.
Data sampling is a paramount task for any data challenges competition. Some
of the corpora focuses in specific on certain targets, like immigrants, women
(HateEval) [5]or racism (e.g. [39]). Others focus on Hate Speech in general (e.g.
HaSpeeDe [7]) or other unacceptable text types. A recent trend is to introduce
a more fine-grained classification. Some data challenges require detailed analysis
for the hateful comments, like detection of the target (HateEval and OffensEval)
or the type of Hate Speech (GermEval). Others focus on the severity of the
comment (Kaggle Toxic [1]). A recent and very interesting collection is CONAN.
It offers Hate Speech and the reactions to it [9]. This could open opportunities
for detecting Hate Speech by analyzing it jointly with the following posts. Table
1 summarize standard Hate speech dataset available at various forum.
There is a huge demand for many languages other than English. HASOC is
the first shared task which developed a resource for three languages together
and which encourages multilingual research.
3 Task Description
HASOC and most other collections provide the text of a post and require systems
to detect hateful content. No context or meta-data like time related features or
the network of the actors are given which might make these tasks somewhat
unrealistic. Platforms can obviously use all meta-data of a post and a user.
However, the distribution of such data poses legal issues. The following tasks
have been proposed in HASOC 2019:
Sub-task A : Sub-task A focuses on Hate speech and Offensive language iden-
tification and is offered for English, German, Hindi. Sub-task A is coarse-grained
binary classification in which participating system are required to classify tweets
into two class, namely: Hate and Offensive (HOF) and Non- Hate and offensive.
1. (NOT) Non Hate-Offensive - This post does not contain any Hate speech,
offensive content.
2. (HOF) Hate and Offensive - This post contains Hate, offensive, and profane
content.
During our annotation, we labeled posts as HOF in case they contained
any form of non-acceptable language such as hate speech, aggression, profanity;
otherwise they were labeled as NOT.
S. Modha et al.
Table 1. Recent Collections for Research on Offensive Content Detection
Dataset Source Language# la-
belled
posts
Task Metric
and Best
Besult
GermEval
Task2 2019
[38]
Twitter German 4000 3 levels,
Hate, type,
implicit/
explicit
Macro F1
0.76
OffensEval at
SemEval [45]
Twitter English 13200 3 levels, Hate,
targeted and
target type
F1 score
0.83
HateEval at
SemEval [5]
Twitter Spanish,
English
19000 Hate, aggres-
sion, target
Macro F1
0.65 Engl.
Kaggle Toxic
[1]
Wikipedia
comments
mostly
English
240000 5-class Column-
wise AUC
0.98
Racism [18] Twitter English 24000 Binary,
Racism
Accuracy
0.76
TRAC COL-
ING [30]
Facebook,
Twitter
English,
Hindi
15000
each
language
3 classes,
overtly or
covertly
aggressive
weighted
F1-score
0.64
Arabic Social
Media [22]
Twitter, Arabic 1100
tweets,
32000
com-
ments
Obscene,
inappropriate
F1 around
0.60
Racism De-
tection in
Social Media
[40]
Belgian
social
media
sites
Dutch 5400 Binary,
Racism
F1 score
0.46
Offensive
Language [11]
Twitter English 14500 Binary, Hate F1 score
0.90
HASOC 2019 Overview
Sub-task B : Sub-task B represents a fine-grained classification. Hate-speech
and offensive posts from the sub-task A are further classified into three cate-
gories.
1. (HATE) Hate speech: Posts contain Hate speech content.
2. (OFFN) Offensive: Posts contain offensive content.
3. (PRFN) Profane: These posts contain profane words
HATE SPEECH : Describing negative attributes or deficiencies to groups of in-
dividuals because they are members of a group (e.g. all poor people are stupid).
Hateful comment toward groups because of race, political opinion, sexual orien-
tation, gender, social status, health condition or similar.
OFFENSIVE : Posts which are degrading, dehumanizing, insulting an individ-
ual, threatening with violent acts are categorized into this category.
PROFANITY : Unacceptable language in the absence of insults and abuse. This
typically concerns the usage of swearwords (Scheiße, Fuck etc.) and cursing (Hell!
Verdammt! etc.). Such posts are categorized into this category. As expected, most
posts are in the category NOT, some are HATE and the other two categories
are less frequent. Dubious cases which are difficult to decide even for humans,
were left out.
Sub-task C (only for English and Hindi) : Sub-task C considers the type
of offense. Only posts labeled as HOF in sub-task A are included in sub-task C.
The two categories in sub-task C are the following:
1. Targeted Insult (TIN): Posts containing an insult/threat to an individual,
group, or others.
2. Untargeted (UNT): Posts containing non targeted profanity and swearing.
Posts with general profanity are not targeted, but they contain non-acceptable
language.
4 Data Set and Collection
The following sections explain how the data set was created and enriched by
annotations. First, the authors searched with heuristics for typical Hate Speech
in online fora. They identified topics for which many hate posts can be expected.
Different hashtags and keywords were used for all three languages. For some of
the found posts, the id of the author was recorded. For a number of such users,
the timeline was collected. Based on tweets found, we crawled the last posts of
the authors to increase variety. The systems are less likely to classify individual
textual style when they have a rich set of posts from an author. This procedure
was intended to decrease bias and was inspired by GermEval [43].
The HASOC dataset was subsequently sampled from Twitter and partially
from Facebook for all the three languages. The Twitter API gives a large number
S. Modha et al.
Table 2. Collection and Class Distribution for Training Set
Lang. NOT HOF HATE OFFN PRFN Total
English 3591 2261 1143 667 451 5852
Hindi 2196 2469 556 676 1237 4665
German 3412 407 111 210 86 3819
Table 3. Collection and Class Distribution for test Dataset
Lang. NOT HOF HATE OFFN PRFN Total
English 865 288 124 71 93 1153
Hindi 713 605 190 197 218 1318
German 714 136 41 77 18 850
Table 4. Example Tweets for all Classes
Classes Sample tweet from the class
NOT 4 matches were can’t play due to rain and many more will
be not played fir the same reason . Conclusion this world
cup is no more world cup. #ShameOnICC #RainCup
HATE Are Muslims, in general a nuisance to be tolerated by
the rest of the world ? #SaveBengal #DoctorsFightBack
#DoctorsStrike #MamtaBanerjee
HATE #TerroristNationPakistan 90% Pakistanis wants war with
India and 10% said war should not be. And Those 10%
belongs to Pakistans Armed Forces #TerroristNationPak-
istan
OFFN #Just a daily reminder to @realDonaldTrump that he is
a National Disgrace. #TraitorTrump #TrumpIsADisgrace
#TrumpIsATraitor
PRFN @cizzacampbell Didn’t realise you were an expert #dick-
head
PRFN
UNT
Who voted for a no-deal? Tell me, who the fuck voted for
a no deal? The way I see it, the referendum was a corrupt
vote between remain and leave. Not remain, leave, deal,
no deal. Nobody voted for no deal!!
OFFN
TIN
@realDonaldTrump Will it be worse than killing children?
Worse than selling your country to the Russians? Worse
than saying you love a ruthless dictator? Probably not.
#TrumpIsATraitor
HASOC 2019 Overview
of recent tweets which resulted in an unbiased dataset. Thus the tweets were
acquired using hashtags and keywords that contained offensive content. The
collection was provided to participants without metadata. We have developed
Twitter and Facebook plugins to fetch the posts without using the API. The
size of the data corpus is shown in tables 2 and 3.
Fig. 1. Screenshot of online Annotation System.
During the labeling process, several juniors for each language engaged with an
online system to judge the tweets. The system can be seen in figure 1 and figure 2.
They were given short guidelines that contained the information as mentioned
in section 3.1. The process is highly subjective, and even after discussions of
questionable often no agreement could be reached. This lies in the nature of
Hate Speech.
As pointed out in the study by Ross et al. [32], not even with providing writ-
ten guidelines can improve the agreement. Consequently, and to be sure that
people can see them on one page, we tried to keep the guidelines short. The
guidelines for HASOC are listed in the annex. A study by Salminen et al. [35]
showed that the dubious and questionable cases led to much more disagreement
than clear cases with obvious Hate Speech characters. Jhaver et al. [14] and col-
leagues interviewed both the receivers and the senders of some posts which were
considered to be aggressive. They revealed that the senders often did not agree
with the judgment of readers. Among other arguments, they brought forward
that some messages were regarded as hateful because people did not want to be
confronted with the arguments. Again, this study shows that there is a great
deal of subjectivity involved and that also context matters.
The difficulties during assessment in HASOC were often related to the use
of language registers like youth talk and irony or indirectness which might not
S. Modha et al.
Fig. 2. Screenshot of Statistics Module of online Annotation System
be understood by all readers. A more detailed analysis of the issues encountered
during the HASOC annotation for German has been carried out[42]. u
The overlap between annotators for task A for English, Hindi, and German
for a subset to tweets and posts annotated twice was 89%, 91%, and 32%, re-
spectively. Further statistical details of the annotation process can be seen in
table 5. The effects of such disagreement need to be analyzed in the future.
Table 5. Interrater Statistics on HASOC Multilingual Datasets
Task No. of Posts
annotated
twice/Total
Posts
Percentage
of Posts
annotated
twice
No. of Posts
with same an-
notation
Interrater
Agreement
English sub-task A 6246/7005 89% 4838 77.46%
English sub-task B 6246/7005 89% 4311 69.02%
English sub-task C 6246/7005 89% 4669 74.75%
Hindi sub-task A 5440/5983 91% 4281 78.69%
Hindi sub-task B 5440/5983 91% 3421 62.89%
Hindi sub-task C 5440/5983 91% 3488 64.12%
German sub-task A 1483/4669 32% 1305 88%
German sub-task B 1483/4669 32% 1283 86.51%
The values show that the labeling task is hard overall. The second sub-task
can only be solved with a lower quality. For the sub-task C, the quality does not
drop much of is even higher than that of sub-task B .
We also calculated the κ (Kappa) coefficient due to the high imbalance of
the data sets. Using the scikit-Learn package, the inter annotator agreement for
HASOC 2019 Overview
the first two annotators for a tweet was determined. Table 6 shows values of κ
in sub-task A for all three languages
Table 6. κ statistics
Language Sub-task A
English 0.36
Hindi 0.59
German 0.43
The degree of disagreement might also result from the topics present in the
collection[46]. The issues and the level of disagreement need to be analyzed in
the future.
5 Evaluation Metrics
The metrics for classification should combine both recall and precision. The F1-
score has many variants like weighted F1, Macro-F1 or micro-F1. For multi-class
classification, the distribution of class labels is often unbalanced. The weighted
F1-score calculates the F1 score for each class independently. When it adds them,
it uses a weight based on the number of true labels of each class. Therefore, it
gives a bias for the majority class. The ’macro’ calculates the F1 separately
for each class but does not use weights for the aggregation. This results in a
stronger penalization when a system does not perform well for the minority
classes. Choice of the variant of F1-measure depends on the objective of the tasks
and the distribution of label in the dataset. Hate Speech related classification
problems suffer from class imbalance. Therefore, the macro F1 is the natural
choice for the evaluation.
6 Results
Overall, 103 registrations were submitted for the track. 37 teams submitted runs
and 25 teams have submitted papers. 321 runs were submitted by 37 teams in
all the sub-tasks.
Table 7. Number of Experiments Submitted
Languages sub-task A sub-task B sub-task C
English 79 50 45
Hindi 37 31 25
German 28 26 n.a.
The following sections show the sub-tasks of HASOC. The approaches of
all teams are briefly summarized in the annex of this paper. For details on
S. Modha et al.
the technical implementation, the reader is referred to the descriptions of the
participating teams in this volume.
6.1 English Dataset
In the English language, Total 174 runs were submitted across 3 sub-tasks. The
YNU wb team [6] used an LSTM approach with ordered neurons and applied an
attention mechanism. The absolute differences between the top runs are rather
small. Table 8 presents the results of the top 10 teams of the English sub-task
A.
Table 8. Best Runs for English Sub-Task A
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 YNU wb [6] 2 0.7882 0.8395
2 YNU wb [6] 3 0.772 0.8237
3 BRUMS [29] 2 0.7694 0.838
4 YNU wb [6] 1 0.7682 0.8175
5 vito [25] 2 0.7568 0.8182
6 vito [25] 3 0.7471 0.8071
7 3Idiots [21] 2 0.7465 0.8012
8 IIITG-ADBU [3] 1 0.7462 0.8064
9 QMUL-NLP [15] 1 0.7431 0.8164
10 RALIGRAPH [19] 3 0.7409 0.7876
11 3Idiots [21] 2 0.8004 0.801
12 QutNocturnal [4] 2 0.8002 0.8001
13 LSV-UdS [10] 3 0.7996 0.7995
14 IIITG-ADBU [3] 3 0.7985 0.7986
15 NITK-IT NLP 2 0.7889 0.7888
16 LSV-UdS [10] 2 0.7837 0.784
17 Kirti Kumari [17] 2 0.7827 0.7826
18 HateMonitors [34] 1 0.7754 0.7759
19 DEEP [24] 1 0.7594 0.7592
20 FalsePostive [16] 2 0.756 0.756
The plot of the performance of all systems in Figure 3 shows that the Median
of the runs lies quite close to the top performance.
Despite the similar performance of many teams, the recall-precision graph in
figure 4 shows that there are considerable differences between the systems which
the F1 measures do not reveal.
The overall F1 measures for sub-task B and C are much lower than for sub-
task A. Table 9 and 10 shows the results of these tasks. The best performing
team [21] for sub-task B and sub-task C used the relatively new BERT model for
classification. This shows that it performed well for both sub-task A with more
training samples as well as for sub-task B with much fewer training instances.
HASOC 2019 Overview
Fig. 3. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for English sub-task A.
Fig. 4. Recall-Precision Graph of all Runs for the English sub-task A
Table 9. Best Runs for sub-task B English Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 3Idiots [21] 3 0.5446 0.7277
2 3Idiots[21] 2 0.537 0.698
3 3Idiots [21] 1 0.5175 0.701
4 VITO [25] 3 0.5064 0.7514
5 VITO [25] 2 0.5051 0.7595
6 RALIGRAPH [19] 2 0.4789 0.7218
7 RALIGRAPH [19] 1 0.4777 0.7147
8 RALIGRAPH [19] 3 0.4732 0.6911
9 LSV-UdS [19] 2 0.4658 0.4948
10 QutNocturnal [4] 1 0.4501 0.6813
S. Modha et al.
Fig. 5. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for English sub-task B
Table 10. Best Runs for sub-task C English Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 3Idiots [21] 3 0.5111 0.7563
2 3Idiots[21] 1 0.5002 0.753
3 VITO [25] 4 0.494 0.7735
4 RALIGRAPHv[19] 2 0.4907 0.7719
5 VITO[25] 2 0.4879 0.784
6 3Idiots [21] 2 0.4765 0.7639
7 RALIGRAPH [19] 3 0.4758 0.7302
8 HateMonitors [34] 1 0.4698 0.7057
9 RALIGRAPH [19] 1 0.4639 0.7265
10 IRLAB@IITBHU [2] 2 0.4578 0.7704
HASOC 2019 Overview
The performance for task C shows that the weighted F1 values are very close
together and that run number 10 has even a higher values than run number 1.
The careful selection of metrics is crucial. The boxplots in figure 5, and 6 show
that the Median lies again close to the top performing run for sub-tasks B and
C.
Fig. 6. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for English sub-task c
6.2 Hindi Dataset
In the Hindi language, total 93 runs were submitted across 3 sub-tasks. The
QutNocturnal team [4] used a CNN base approach with Word2vec embedding.
The absolute differences between the top runs are rather small. Table 11 presents
results of the top team of Hindi sub-task A The absolute values for Hindi sub-
task A are comparable to the English sub-task and the top-performing systems
are again close to each other.
Table 11. Best Runs for sub-task A Hindi Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 QutNocturnal [4] 1 0.8149 0.8202
2 LGI2P [13] 2 0.8111 0.8116
3 3Idiots [21] 3 0.8108 0.8141
4 IIITG-ADBU [3] 2 0.8105 0.8108
5 IIITG-ADBU [3] 1 0.8098 0.81
6 LGI2P [13] 1 0.8076 0.8088
7 A3-108 [23] 2 0.8032 0.8032
8 brum [29] 1 0.8025 0.8024
9 A3-108 [23] 3 0.8024 0.8024
10 3Idiots [21] 1 0.8018 0.8025
S. Modha et al.
Fig. 7. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for Hindi sub-task A
Table 12. Best Runs for sub-task B Hindi Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 3Idiots 3 0.5812 0.7147
2 LSV-UdS [10] 3 0.5779 0.6358
3 LSV-UdS [10] 2 0.5692 0.6386
4 LGI2P [13] 3 0.5617 0.674
5 QutNocturnal [4] 1 0.561 0.6551
6 3Idiots [21] 2 0.5534 0.6755
7 3Idiots [21] 1 0.5527 0.6875
8 LSV-UdS [10] 1 0.5392 0.5504
9 A3-108 [23] 2 0.5253 0.756
10 A3-108 [23] 3 0.5113 0.7514
Table 12 and 13 presents result of Hindi sub-task B and C.The overall values
for sub-task B and C for Hindi are again comparable to the values for English.
Figure 7, 8,9 shows the overall performance of all teams for all Hindi sub-tasks.
6.3 German Dataset
In the German language, total 54 runs were submitted across 2 sub-tasks and
only, the first two sub-tasks were possible. The Macro F1 score is lower than
for the other two languages. For sub-task A, the best team used BERT sentence
embedding and the multilingual sentence embedding LASER. Table 14 and 15
present result of sub-task A and B.
The LSV team [10] performed second and first for sub-task B. They apply
the BERT model and use additional corpora for similar tasks. Boxplots of the
performance of all the participants team are shown in figure 10 and 11.
7 Approaches
The top performance for the sub-task A for English and and Hindi three lan-
guages is delivered by systems based on Deep neural models. Even new archi-
tectures for which little experience is available like BERT have been applied
HASOC 2019 Overview
Fig. 8. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for Hindi sub-task B
Table 13. Best Runs for sub-task c Hindi Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 A3-108 [23] 3 0.5754 0.7361
2 3Idiots [21] 1 0.565 0.7265
3 A3-108 [23] 2 0.5559 0.7447
4 3Idiots [21] 3 0.5503 0.7583
5 3Idiots [21] 2 0.5492 0.7484
6 DEEP [24] 3 0.5238 0.6803
7 DEEP [24] 1 0.5172 0.6967
8 QutNocturnal[4] 1 0.5165 0.7429
9 KMI-Panlingua [31] 1 0.497 0.6499
10 KMI-Panlingua [31] 2 0.497 0.6499
Fig. 9. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for Hindi sub-task C
S. Modha et al.
Table 14. Best Runs for Sub-task A German Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 HateMonitors [34] 1 0.6162 0.7915
2 LSV-UdS [10] 1 0.6064 0.7997
3 LSV-UdS [10] 2 0.5948 0.7799
4 3Idiots [21] 1 0.5774 0.7887
5 NITK-IT NLP 1 0.5739 0.6796
6 DLRG [28] 2 0.5519 0.7566
7 CS 1 0.5506 0.7131
8 BRUMS [29] 1 0.5464 0.787
9 DLRG [28] 1 0.5458 0.7816
10 LSV-UdS [10] 2 0.5399 0.7762
Fig. 10. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for German sub-task A
Table 15. Best Runs for Sub-task B German Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 LSV-UdS [10] 1 0.3468 0.7749
2 LSV-UdS [10] 3 0.2785 0.5829
3 HateMonitors [34] 1 0.2769 0.7537
4 3Idiots [21] 2 0.2758 0.7779
5 Cs 1 0.274 0.757
6 3Idiots [21] 3 0.2736 0.7729
7 FalsePostive [16] 3 0.268 0.7458
8 FalsePostive [16] 2 0.2619 0.7436
9 FalsePostive [16] 1 0.2608 0.7536
10 LSV-UdS [10] 2 0.2558 0.7545
HASOC 2019 Overview
Fig. 11. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for German sub-task B
with great success. There is even true for sub-task B for German where only
few training examples were available. There needs to be considered that most
systems applied a Deep Learning system (see annex B). However, for Hindi the
top performance comes from a traditional machine learning system. Even for the
other two languages, we can observe that some of the few non-Deep Learning
systems lead to a performance quite close to the top performance. For example,
Team A3-108 [23] reaches a result close to the top performance for the Hindi sub-
task B. Also the run IRLAB@IITBHU [2] achieves a higher weighted F1 value
than the top run for sub-task B for English. It seems that the size of HASOC
is small enough that traditional approaches can still prevail. There might not
be enough data to train Deep architectures with many parameters. Future im-
provement for such systems might lie in the intelligent use of external resources.
Participants were allowed to use external resources and other datasets for this
task. For German, this seems to have boosted the top performing team LSV-UdS
for the sub-task B for which only few training examples were available.
Several teams have adopted an open code policy and published their code in
Github repositories. This policy allows repeat-ability and reproducibility of the
experiments.
8 Performance Analysis
Some of the participants have conducted an interesting analysis in order to
explore the behavior of their systems. We tried to explore the performance of all
systems on each tweet. We ranked the tweets for sub-task A in English based
on the number of systems that classified them. The following figure shows the
distribution of the values.
We can observe that only 30% of the systems agree a post is an offensive (class
HOF) considering the Median. On the other hand, 70% of the systems vote for
NOT in the Median for the class NOT. However, the distributions are quite
scattered. This shows that for the systems there seem to be no clear and obvious
S. Modha et al.
Fig. 12. Box-plot of the percentage of systems votes for tweets for English sub-task A
cases. Considering the analysis of Salminen et al. in which humans agreed much
on obvious Hate Speech tweets [35], there seems to be less agreement by systems.
As a consequence, voting approaches might not work well. Another consequence
could be that it is hard to explain and understand the decision of a classifier in
this domain. This may lead to a lack of ability to explain decisions and a lack
of transparency. This can result in a low degree of acceptance in society. More
analysis of the results is necessary for the future.
9 Conclusion and Outlook
The submissions for HASOC have shown that deep learning representations
seem to be the state of the art approach for Hate Speech classification. After
analyzing the results, the best method for Hate speech classification is dependent
on the corpus language, classification granularities, and distribution of each class-
labels. In other words balance, an unbalanced training dataset might affect the
performance of the classification system. In the long run, the HASOC track aims
at supporting researchers to develop robust technology which can cope with
multilingual data and to develop transfer learning approaches that can exploit
learning data across languages. For future editions, we envision the integration of
further languages. The potential bias in the data collection needs to be analyzed
and monitored [43].
10 Acknowledgements
We thank all participants for their submissions and the work involved. We thank
all the jurors who labeled the tweets in a short period of time. We also thank
the FIRE organizers for their support in organizing the track.
HASOC 2019 Overview
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A Appendix
A.1 Annotation Guidelines for HASOC 2019
HATE SPEECH Ascribing negative attributes or deficiencies to groups of indi-
viduals because they are members of a group (e.g. all poor people are stupid).
Hateful comment toward groups because of race, political opinion, sexual orien-
tation, gender, social status, health condition or similar.
OFFENSIVE Degrading, dehumanizing or insulting an individual. Threatening
with violent acts.
PROFANITY Unacceptable language in the absence of insults and abuse. This
typically concerns the usage of swearwords (Scheiße, Fuck etc.) and cursing (Zur
Ho¨lle! Verdammt! etc.).
OTHER Normal content, statements, or anything else. If the utterances are
considered to be “normal” and not offending to anyone, they should not be
labeled. This could be part of youth language or other language registers.
We expect most posts to be OTHER, some to be HATE and the other two
categories to be less frequent.
Dubious cases which are difficult to decide even for humans, should be left
out.
HASOC 2019 Overview
B Appendix
B.1 Systems and Approaches at HASOC 2019
The following tables summarize the approaches used by the teams. The last
col-umn has an entry when the team compared several approaches and clearly
identi-fied a best one. The first table shows the approaches which used technology
without Deep Learning or for which a traditional approaches performed best.
The second table shows the approaches which used Deep Learning.
Table 16. Participants Team Approaches : based on traditional classifiers
Team name Affiliation Text Representa-
tion and Classifier
Best run
(when appli-
cable)
DEEP [24] Benha Univ.,
Egypt & Manga-
lore Univ.
TF/IDF weighting,
SVM, MLP
SVM
IRLAB@IITBHU [2] IIT Varanasi SVM, Xboost SVM
A3-108 [23] IIIT-Hyderabad Several Word
and character n-
grams, Length of
tweet, SVM, Ada-
Boost, Random
Forest,LSTM
ML instead of
Deep Learning
DA Master [26] DAIICT TFIDF, log. Regres-
sion;, CNN
TFIDF, log. Re-
gression
DLRG [28] Vellore Institute of
Technology, Chen-
nai
TF/IDF, Ensemble Random Forest
UACh-INAOE [8] Univ. Autonoma
Chihuahua & In-
stit. National de
Astrofisica
Word and character
n-grams, Word em-
beddings, Clustering,
Flesch Scores, NER
count, LR, SVM
Word and char-
acter n-gram fre-
quencies, LR
Hate Monitors [34] IIT Kharagpur BERT, LASER,
Light Gradient
Boosting
Light Gradient
Boosting
Dracarys [41] IIT Bombay & Ap-
ple
CNN, SVM SVM
S. Modha et al.
Table 17. participants Team Approaches : based on Deep neural model & Transfer
Learning
Team name Affiliation Text Representa-
tion and Classifier
Best run
(when appli-
cable)
AI ML NIT [17] IIT Patna CNN, fastText fastText, one-
Hot
Amrita [37] Amrita Vishwa
Vidyapeetham
CNN, LSTM fast-
Text
LGI2P [13] Univ Montpellier fastText
CIT Kokrajhar [33] University of Ed-
monton & CIT
Kokrajhar
LSTM LSTM
YNU wb [6] Yunnan Univ. ON-LSTM, Atten-
tion mechanism,
K-folding, Ensemble
ON-LSTM
QutNocturnal [4] Queensland Univ.
of Technology,
Brisbane
LSTM, DNN,SVM,
kNN. Boosting
CNN,Transfer
learning
QMUL-NLP [15] Queen Mary Univ.
London
TFIDF, Word2Vec,
LSTM
Word2Vec &
LSTM
am905771 [20] IIT Varanasi Glove, Bi
LSTM,Attention
Glove Twitter
IIITG-ADBU [3] IIIT Guwahati, &
IBM Research In-
dia
ELMO, GLOVE,
fastText, log. Re-
gression, SVM,
BiLSTM
fastText , BiL-
STM
Vito [25] Univ. Polite´cnica
de Valencia
POS tagging,CNN,
BiLSTM,
Ensemble
TheNorth [27] Lule˚a University
of Technology,
Sweden
Bi-LSTM Bi-LSTM
FALSE Positive [16] IIIT Guwahati Stacked BiLSTM;
CNN
RALIGRAPH [19] Univ. of Montral BERT, Graph
CNNPre-trained
with external Founta
corpus
VCGN-BERT
3Idiots [21] Univ. of Illinois &
IIT Kanpur
BERT, All 3 tasks in
one
BERT cased
BRUMS [29] Univ of Wolver-
hampton,
Rochester In-
stitute of Techn. &
Birmingham City
Univ
Several deep learn-
ing architectures
including LSTM,
GRU, Attention, 2D
Convolution,light
pre-processing
BERT
KMI-Panlingua [31] Bhimrao Ambed-
kar Univ. & Pan-
lingua & Charles
Univ. Prague
BERT, Char and
word ngrams + SVM
BERT
LSV-UdS [10] Saarland Univer-
sity
BERT,
SVM,External
collections
BERT
学霸联盟
Hate Speech and Offensive Content
Identification in Indo-European Languages
Sandip Modha1,4[0000−0003−2427−2433], Thomas Mandl2,3[0000−0002−8398−9699],
Prasenjit Majumder3, and Daksh Patel4
1 DA-IICT,Gandhinagar,India sjmodha@gmail.com
2 University of Hildesheim, Germany mandl@uni-hildesheim.de
3 DA-IICT,Gandhinagar,India prasenjit.majumder@gmail.com
4 LDRP-ITR,Gandhinagar,India dakshpatel68@gmail.com
Abstract. The identification of Hate Speech in Social Media has re-
ceived much attention in research recently. There is a particular demand
for research for languages other than English. The first edition of the
HASOC track creates resources for Hate Speech Identification in Hindi,
German, and English. Three datasets were developed from Twitter, and
Facebook and made available. HASOC intends to stimulate research and
development for Hate Speech classification for different languages. The
datasets allow the development and testing of supervised machine learn-
ing systems. Binary classification and more fine-grained sub-classes were
offered in 3 sub tasks. For all sub-tasks, 321 experiments were submitted.
For the classification task, models based on deep learning methods have
proved to be adequate. The approaches used most often were Long-Short-
Term memory (LSTM) networks with distributed word representation of
the text. The performance of the best system for identification of Hate
Speech for English, Hindi, and German was a Marco-F1 score of 0.78,
0.81, and 0.61, respectively. This overview provides details insights and
analyzes the results.
Keywords: Hate Speech · Text Classification · Evaluation· Deep Learn-
ing.
1 Introduction
The large fraction of Hate Speech and other offensive and objectionable content
online poses a huge challenge to societies. Offensive language such as insulting,
hurtful, derogatory, or obscene content directed from one person to another per-
son and open for others undermines objective discussions. There is a growing
need for research on the classification of Hate Speech into different categories
of offensive content on different platforms of social media without human assis-
tance.
Copyright c©2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Com-
mons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). FIRE 2019, 12-15 Decem-
ber 2019, Kolkata, India.
S. Modha et al.
In October 2019, the European Court of Justice decided that platforms need
to take down content worldwide even after national decisions. In a particular
case, the EU court debated defamatory posts on Facebook. Even posts similar in
tone need to be addressed and the ruling explicitly mentions automatic systems.
This shows that automatic systems are of high social relevance. Recently, also
the founder of Facebook proposed ideas for the regulation of the Internet. He
demanded standards and baselines for the definition of harmful content. Such
clear definitions have not been provided and are unlikely to be developed in the
near future. This makes research and annotated corpora even more necessary.
The identification of Hate Speech within a collection or a stream of tweets
is a challenging task because systems cannot rely on the text content. Based
on content, text classification systems have been successful. However, Hate text
might have many issues. Hate often has no clear signal words, and word lists, as
in sentiment analysis, are expected to work less well.
In order to contribute to this research, w this overview paper presents the
1st edition of HASOC Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-
European Languages, namely: German, English, and Hindi. The dataset for
all three languages was created from Twitter and Facebook. HASOC consists
of three tasks, a coarse-grained binary classification task, and two fine-grained
multi-class classifications. Of course, freedom of speech needs to be guaranteed
in democratic societies for future development. Nevertheless, the offensive text
which hurts others’ sentiments needs to be restricted. As there is such an in-
crease in the usage of abuse on many internet platforms, technological support
for the recognition of such posts is necessary. The use of supervised learning with
the annotated dataset is a key strategy for advancing such systems. There has
been significant work in several languages in particular for English. However,
there is a lack of research on this recent and relevant topic for most other lan-
guages. This track intends to develop data and evaluation resources for several
languages. The objectives are to stimulate research for these languages and to
find out the quality of hate speech detection technology in other languages.
The HASOC dataset provides several thousands labeled social media posts
for each language. The entire dataset was annotated and checked by the orga-
nizers of the track. The annotation architecture is designed to create data for 3
different sub tasks.
1. SUB-TASK A: classification of Hate Speech (HOF) and non-offensive con-
tent.
2. SUB-TASK B: If the post is HOF, sub-task B is used to identify the type of
hate.
3. SUB-TASK C: it decides the target of the post.
Hate Speech detection is of great significance and attracting many researchers.
Recent overview papers provide a good introduction to the scientific issues that
are involved in Hate Speech identification [12,36].
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/technology/facebook-europe.html
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/diginomics/facebook-ceo-zuckerberg-ideas-
to-regulate-the-internet-16116032.html
HASOC 2019 Overview
2 Related Forum and Dataset
Collections are an important asset for any supervised classification methods.
For Hate Speech, several previous initiatives have created corpora that have
been used for research. There has been significant work in several languages,
in particular for English. However, for other languages, such as Hindi standard
datasets are not available and HASOC is an attempt to create the labeled dataset
for such low resource language. HASOC is primarily inspired by two previous
evaluation forums, GermEval [44], and OffensEval [47], and tries to leverage the
synergies of these initiatives.
Data sampling is a paramount task for any data challenges competition. Some
of the corpora focuses in specific on certain targets, like immigrants, women
(HateEval) [5]or racism (e.g. [39]). Others focus on Hate Speech in general (e.g.
HaSpeeDe [7]) or other unacceptable text types. A recent trend is to introduce
a more fine-grained classification. Some data challenges require detailed analysis
for the hateful comments, like detection of the target (HateEval and OffensEval)
or the type of Hate Speech (GermEval). Others focus on the severity of the
comment (Kaggle Toxic [1]). A recent and very interesting collection is CONAN.
It offers Hate Speech and the reactions to it [9]. This could open opportunities
for detecting Hate Speech by analyzing it jointly with the following posts. Table
1 summarize standard Hate speech dataset available at various forum.
There is a huge demand for many languages other than English. HASOC is
the first shared task which developed a resource for three languages together
and which encourages multilingual research.
3 Task Description
HASOC and most other collections provide the text of a post and require systems
to detect hateful content. No context or meta-data like time related features or
the network of the actors are given which might make these tasks somewhat
unrealistic. Platforms can obviously use all meta-data of a post and a user.
However, the distribution of such data poses legal issues. The following tasks
have been proposed in HASOC 2019:
Sub-task A : Sub-task A focuses on Hate speech and Offensive language iden-
tification and is offered for English, German, Hindi. Sub-task A is coarse-grained
binary classification in which participating system are required to classify tweets
into two class, namely: Hate and Offensive (HOF) and Non- Hate and offensive.
1. (NOT) Non Hate-Offensive - This post does not contain any Hate speech,
offensive content.
2. (HOF) Hate and Offensive - This post contains Hate, offensive, and profane
content.
During our annotation, we labeled posts as HOF in case they contained
any form of non-acceptable language such as hate speech, aggression, profanity;
otherwise they were labeled as NOT.
S. Modha et al.
Table 1. Recent Collections for Research on Offensive Content Detection
Dataset Source Language# la-
belled
posts
Task Metric
and Best
Besult
GermEval
Task2 2019
[38]
Twitter German 4000 3 levels,
Hate, type,
implicit/
explicit
Macro F1
0.76
OffensEval at
SemEval [45]
Twitter English 13200 3 levels, Hate,
targeted and
target type
F1 score
0.83
HateEval at
SemEval [5]
Twitter Spanish,
English
19000 Hate, aggres-
sion, target
Macro F1
0.65 Engl.
Kaggle Toxic
[1]
Wikipedia
comments
mostly
English
240000 5-class Column-
wise AUC
0.98
Racism [18] Twitter English 24000 Binary,
Racism
Accuracy
0.76
TRAC COL-
ING [30]
Facebook,
English,
Hindi
15000
each
language
3 classes,
overtly or
covertly
aggressive
weighted
F1-score
0.64
Arabic Social
Media [22]
Twitter, Arabic 1100
tweets,
32000
com-
ments
Obscene,
inappropriate
F1 around
0.60
Racism De-
tection in
Social Media
[40]
Belgian
social
media
sites
Dutch 5400 Binary,
Racism
F1 score
0.46
Offensive
Language [11]
Twitter English 14500 Binary, Hate F1 score
0.90
HASOC 2019 Overview
Sub-task B : Sub-task B represents a fine-grained classification. Hate-speech
and offensive posts from the sub-task A are further classified into three cate-
gories.
1. (HATE) Hate speech: Posts contain Hate speech content.
2. (OFFN) Offensive: Posts contain offensive content.
3. (PRFN) Profane: These posts contain profane words
HATE SPEECH : Describing negative attributes or deficiencies to groups of in-
dividuals because they are members of a group (e.g. all poor people are stupid).
Hateful comment toward groups because of race, political opinion, sexual orien-
tation, gender, social status, health condition or similar.
OFFENSIVE : Posts which are degrading, dehumanizing, insulting an individ-
ual, threatening with violent acts are categorized into this category.
PROFANITY : Unacceptable language in the absence of insults and abuse. This
typically concerns the usage of swearwords (Scheiße, Fuck etc.) and cursing (Hell!
Verdammt! etc.). Such posts are categorized into this category. As expected, most
posts are in the category NOT, some are HATE and the other two categories
are less frequent. Dubious cases which are difficult to decide even for humans,
were left out.
Sub-task C (only for English and Hindi) : Sub-task C considers the type
of offense. Only posts labeled as HOF in sub-task A are included in sub-task C.
The two categories in sub-task C are the following:
1. Targeted Insult (TIN): Posts containing an insult/threat to an individual,
group, or others.
2. Untargeted (UNT): Posts containing non targeted profanity and swearing.
Posts with general profanity are not targeted, but they contain non-acceptable
language.
4 Data Set and Collection
The following sections explain how the data set was created and enriched by
annotations. First, the authors searched with heuristics for typical Hate Speech
in online fora. They identified topics for which many hate posts can be expected.
Different hashtags and keywords were used for all three languages. For some of
the found posts, the id of the author was recorded. For a number of such users,
the timeline was collected. Based on tweets found, we crawled the last posts of
the authors to increase variety. The systems are less likely to classify individual
textual style when they have a rich set of posts from an author. This procedure
was intended to decrease bias and was inspired by GermEval [43].
The HASOC dataset was subsequently sampled from Twitter and partially
from Facebook for all the three languages. The Twitter API gives a large number
S. Modha et al.
Table 2. Collection and Class Distribution for Training Set
Lang. NOT HOF HATE OFFN PRFN Total
English 3591 2261 1143 667 451 5852
Hindi 2196 2469 556 676 1237 4665
German 3412 407 111 210 86 3819
Table 3. Collection and Class Distribution for test Dataset
Lang. NOT HOF HATE OFFN PRFN Total
English 865 288 124 71 93 1153
Hindi 713 605 190 197 218 1318
German 714 136 41 77 18 850
Table 4. Example Tweets for all Classes
Classes Sample tweet from the class
NOT 4 matches were can’t play due to rain and many more will
be not played fir the same reason . Conclusion this world
cup is no more world cup. #ShameOnICC #RainCup
HATE Are Muslims, in general a nuisance to be tolerated by
the rest of the world ? #SaveBengal #DoctorsFightBack
#DoctorsStrike #MamtaBanerjee
HATE #TerroristNationPakistan 90% Pakistanis wants war with
India and 10% said war should not be. And Those 10%
belongs to Pakistans Armed Forces #TerroristNationPak-
istan
OFFN #Just a daily reminder to @realDonaldTrump that he is
a National Disgrace. #TraitorTrump #TrumpIsADisgrace
#TrumpIsATraitor
PRFN @cizzacampbell Didn’t realise you were an expert #dick-
head
PRFN
UNT
Who voted for a no-deal? Tell me, who the fuck voted for
a no deal? The way I see it, the referendum was a corrupt
vote between remain and leave. Not remain, leave, deal,
no deal. Nobody voted for no deal!!
OFFN
TIN
@realDonaldTrump Will it be worse than killing children?
Worse than selling your country to the Russians? Worse
than saying you love a ruthless dictator? Probably not.
#TrumpIsATraitor
HASOC 2019 Overview
of recent tweets which resulted in an unbiased dataset. Thus the tweets were
acquired using hashtags and keywords that contained offensive content. The
collection was provided to participants without metadata. We have developed
Twitter and Facebook plugins to fetch the posts without using the API. The
size of the data corpus is shown in tables 2 and 3.
Fig. 1. Screenshot of online Annotation System.
During the labeling process, several juniors for each language engaged with an
online system to judge the tweets. The system can be seen in figure 1 and figure 2.
They were given short guidelines that contained the information as mentioned
in section 3.1. The process is highly subjective, and even after discussions of
questionable often no agreement could be reached. This lies in the nature of
Hate Speech.
As pointed out in the study by Ross et al. [32], not even with providing writ-
ten guidelines can improve the agreement. Consequently, and to be sure that
people can see them on one page, we tried to keep the guidelines short. The
guidelines for HASOC are listed in the annex. A study by Salminen et al. [35]
showed that the dubious and questionable cases led to much more disagreement
than clear cases with obvious Hate Speech characters. Jhaver et al. [14] and col-
leagues interviewed both the receivers and the senders of some posts which were
considered to be aggressive. They revealed that the senders often did not agree
with the judgment of readers. Among other arguments, they brought forward
that some messages were regarded as hateful because people did not want to be
confronted with the arguments. Again, this study shows that there is a great
deal of subjectivity involved and that also context matters.
The difficulties during assessment in HASOC were often related to the use
of language registers like youth talk and irony or indirectness which might not
S. Modha et al.
Fig. 2. Screenshot of Statistics Module of online Annotation System
be understood by all readers. A more detailed analysis of the issues encountered
during the HASOC annotation for German has been carried out[42]. u
The overlap between annotators for task A for English, Hindi, and German
for a subset to tweets and posts annotated twice was 89%, 91%, and 32%, re-
spectively. Further statistical details of the annotation process can be seen in
table 5. The effects of such disagreement need to be analyzed in the future.
Table 5. Interrater Statistics on HASOC Multilingual Datasets
Task No. of Posts
annotated
twice/Total
Posts
Percentage
of Posts
annotated
twice
No. of Posts
with same an-
notation
Interrater
Agreement
English sub-task A 6246/7005 89% 4838 77.46%
English sub-task B 6246/7005 89% 4311 69.02%
English sub-task C 6246/7005 89% 4669 74.75%
Hindi sub-task A 5440/5983 91% 4281 78.69%
Hindi sub-task B 5440/5983 91% 3421 62.89%
Hindi sub-task C 5440/5983 91% 3488 64.12%
German sub-task A 1483/4669 32% 1305 88%
German sub-task B 1483/4669 32% 1283 86.51%
The values show that the labeling task is hard overall. The second sub-task
can only be solved with a lower quality. For the sub-task C, the quality does not
drop much of is even higher than that of sub-task B .
We also calculated the κ (Kappa) coefficient due to the high imbalance of
the data sets. Using the scikit-Learn package, the inter annotator agreement for
HASOC 2019 Overview
the first two annotators for a tweet was determined. Table 6 shows values of κ
in sub-task A for all three languages
Table 6. κ statistics
Language Sub-task A
English 0.36
Hindi 0.59
German 0.43
The degree of disagreement might also result from the topics present in the
collection[46]. The issues and the level of disagreement need to be analyzed in
the future.
5 Evaluation Metrics
The metrics for classification should combine both recall and precision. The F1-
score has many variants like weighted F1, Macro-F1 or micro-F1. For multi-class
classification, the distribution of class labels is often unbalanced. The weighted
F1-score calculates the F1 score for each class independently. When it adds them,
it uses a weight based on the number of true labels of each class. Therefore, it
gives a bias for the majority class. The ’macro’ calculates the F1 separately
for each class but does not use weights for the aggregation. This results in a
stronger penalization when a system does not perform well for the minority
classes. Choice of the variant of F1-measure depends on the objective of the tasks
and the distribution of label in the dataset. Hate Speech related classification
problems suffer from class imbalance. Therefore, the macro F1 is the natural
choice for the evaluation.
6 Results
Overall, 103 registrations were submitted for the track. 37 teams submitted runs
and 25 teams have submitted papers. 321 runs were submitted by 37 teams in
all the sub-tasks.
Table 7. Number of Experiments Submitted
Languages sub-task A sub-task B sub-task C
English 79 50 45
Hindi 37 31 25
German 28 26 n.a.
The following sections show the sub-tasks of HASOC. The approaches of
all teams are briefly summarized in the annex of this paper. For details on
S. Modha et al.
the technical implementation, the reader is referred to the descriptions of the
participating teams in this volume.
6.1 English Dataset
In the English language, Total 174 runs were submitted across 3 sub-tasks. The
YNU wb team [6] used an LSTM approach with ordered neurons and applied an
attention mechanism. The absolute differences between the top runs are rather
small. Table 8 presents the results of the top 10 teams of the English sub-task
A.
Table 8. Best Runs for English Sub-Task A
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 YNU wb [6] 2 0.7882 0.8395
2 YNU wb [6] 3 0.772 0.8237
3 BRUMS [29] 2 0.7694 0.838
4 YNU wb [6] 1 0.7682 0.8175
5 vito [25] 2 0.7568 0.8182
6 vito [25] 3 0.7471 0.8071
7 3Idiots [21] 2 0.7465 0.8012
8 IIITG-ADBU [3] 1 0.7462 0.8064
9 QMUL-NLP [15] 1 0.7431 0.8164
10 RALIGRAPH [19] 3 0.7409 0.7876
11 3Idiots [21] 2 0.8004 0.801
12 QutNocturnal [4] 2 0.8002 0.8001
13 LSV-UdS [10] 3 0.7996 0.7995
14 IIITG-ADBU [3] 3 0.7985 0.7986
15 NITK-IT NLP 2 0.7889 0.7888
16 LSV-UdS [10] 2 0.7837 0.784
17 Kirti Kumari [17] 2 0.7827 0.7826
18 HateMonitors [34] 1 0.7754 0.7759
19 DEEP [24] 1 0.7594 0.7592
20 FalsePostive [16] 2 0.756 0.756
The plot of the performance of all systems in Figure 3 shows that the Median
of the runs lies quite close to the top performance.
Despite the similar performance of many teams, the recall-precision graph in
figure 4 shows that there are considerable differences between the systems which
the F1 measures do not reveal.
The overall F1 measures for sub-task B and C are much lower than for sub-
task A. Table 9 and 10 shows the results of these tasks. The best performing
team [21] for sub-task B and sub-task C used the relatively new BERT model for
classification. This shows that it performed well for both sub-task A with more
training samples as well as for sub-task B with much fewer training instances.
HASOC 2019 Overview
Fig. 3. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for English sub-task A.
Fig. 4. Recall-Precision Graph of all Runs for the English sub-task A
Table 9. Best Runs for sub-task B English Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 3Idiots [21] 3 0.5446 0.7277
2 3Idiots[21] 2 0.537 0.698
3 3Idiots [21] 1 0.5175 0.701
4 VITO [25] 3 0.5064 0.7514
5 VITO [25] 2 0.5051 0.7595
6 RALIGRAPH [19] 2 0.4789 0.7218
7 RALIGRAPH [19] 1 0.4777 0.7147
8 RALIGRAPH [19] 3 0.4732 0.6911
9 LSV-UdS [19] 2 0.4658 0.4948
10 QutNocturnal [4] 1 0.4501 0.6813
S. Modha et al.
Fig. 5. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for English sub-task B
Table 10. Best Runs for sub-task C English Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 3Idiots [21] 3 0.5111 0.7563
2 3Idiots[21] 1 0.5002 0.753
3 VITO [25] 4 0.494 0.7735
4 RALIGRAPHv[19] 2 0.4907 0.7719
5 VITO[25] 2 0.4879 0.784
6 3Idiots [21] 2 0.4765 0.7639
7 RALIGRAPH [19] 3 0.4758 0.7302
8 HateMonitors [34] 1 0.4698 0.7057
9 RALIGRAPH [19] 1 0.4639 0.7265
10 IRLAB@IITBHU [2] 2 0.4578 0.7704
HASOC 2019 Overview
The performance for task C shows that the weighted F1 values are very close
together and that run number 10 has even a higher values than run number 1.
The careful selection of metrics is crucial. The boxplots in figure 5, and 6 show
that the Median lies again close to the top performing run for sub-tasks B and
C.
Fig. 6. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for English sub-task c
6.2 Hindi Dataset
In the Hindi language, total 93 runs were submitted across 3 sub-tasks. The
QutNocturnal team [4] used a CNN base approach with Word2vec embedding.
The absolute differences between the top runs are rather small. Table 11 presents
results of the top team of Hindi sub-task A The absolute values for Hindi sub-
task A are comparable to the English sub-task and the top-performing systems
are again close to each other.
Table 11. Best Runs for sub-task A Hindi Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 QutNocturnal [4] 1 0.8149 0.8202
2 LGI2P [13] 2 0.8111 0.8116
3 3Idiots [21] 3 0.8108 0.8141
4 IIITG-ADBU [3] 2 0.8105 0.8108
5 IIITG-ADBU [3] 1 0.8098 0.81
6 LGI2P [13] 1 0.8076 0.8088
7 A3-108 [23] 2 0.8032 0.8032
8 brum [29] 1 0.8025 0.8024
9 A3-108 [23] 3 0.8024 0.8024
10 3Idiots [21] 1 0.8018 0.8025
S. Modha et al.
Fig. 7. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for Hindi sub-task A
Table 12. Best Runs for sub-task B Hindi Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 3Idiots 3 0.5812 0.7147
2 LSV-UdS [10] 3 0.5779 0.6358
3 LSV-UdS [10] 2 0.5692 0.6386
4 LGI2P [13] 3 0.5617 0.674
5 QutNocturnal [4] 1 0.561 0.6551
6 3Idiots [21] 2 0.5534 0.6755
7 3Idiots [21] 1 0.5527 0.6875
8 LSV-UdS [10] 1 0.5392 0.5504
9 A3-108 [23] 2 0.5253 0.756
10 A3-108 [23] 3 0.5113 0.7514
Table 12 and 13 presents result of Hindi sub-task B and C.The overall values
for sub-task B and C for Hindi are again comparable to the values for English.
Figure 7, 8,9 shows the overall performance of all teams for all Hindi sub-tasks.
6.3 German Dataset
In the German language, total 54 runs were submitted across 2 sub-tasks and
only, the first two sub-tasks were possible. The Macro F1 score is lower than
for the other two languages. For sub-task A, the best team used BERT sentence
embedding and the multilingual sentence embedding LASER. Table 14 and 15
present result of sub-task A and B.
The LSV team [10] performed second and first for sub-task B. They apply
the BERT model and use additional corpora for similar tasks. Boxplots of the
performance of all the participants team are shown in figure 10 and 11.
7 Approaches
The top performance for the sub-task A for English and and Hindi three lan-
guages is delivered by systems based on Deep neural models. Even new archi-
tectures for which little experience is available like BERT have been applied
HASOC 2019 Overview
Fig. 8. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for Hindi sub-task B
Table 13. Best Runs for sub-task c Hindi Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 A3-108 [23] 3 0.5754 0.7361
2 3Idiots [21] 1 0.565 0.7265
3 A3-108 [23] 2 0.5559 0.7447
4 3Idiots [21] 3 0.5503 0.7583
5 3Idiots [21] 2 0.5492 0.7484
6 DEEP [24] 3 0.5238 0.6803
7 DEEP [24] 1 0.5172 0.6967
8 QutNocturnal[4] 1 0.5165 0.7429
9 KMI-Panlingua [31] 1 0.497 0.6499
10 KMI-Panlingua [31] 2 0.497 0.6499
Fig. 9. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for Hindi sub-task C
S. Modha et al.
Table 14. Best Runs for Sub-task A German Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 HateMonitors [34] 1 0.6162 0.7915
2 LSV-UdS [10] 1 0.6064 0.7997
3 LSV-UdS [10] 2 0.5948 0.7799
4 3Idiots [21] 1 0.5774 0.7887
5 NITK-IT NLP 1 0.5739 0.6796
6 DLRG [28] 2 0.5519 0.7566
7 CS 1 0.5506 0.7131
8 BRUMS [29] 1 0.5464 0.787
9 DLRG [28] 1 0.5458 0.7816
10 LSV-UdS [10] 2 0.5399 0.7762
Fig. 10. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for German sub-task A
Table 15. Best Runs for Sub-task B German Dataset
Standing Team name Run no Marco F1 Weighted F1
1 LSV-UdS [10] 1 0.3468 0.7749
2 LSV-UdS [10] 3 0.2785 0.5829
3 HateMonitors [34] 1 0.2769 0.7537
4 3Idiots [21] 2 0.2758 0.7779
5 Cs 1 0.274 0.757
6 3Idiots [21] 3 0.2736 0.7729
7 FalsePostive [16] 3 0.268 0.7458
8 FalsePostive [16] 2 0.2619 0.7436
9 FalsePostive [16] 1 0.2608 0.7536
10 LSV-UdS [10] 2 0.2558 0.7545
HASOC 2019 Overview
Fig. 11. Box-plot of the performance of all runs for German sub-task B
with great success. There is even true for sub-task B for German where only
few training examples were available. There needs to be considered that most
systems applied a Deep Learning system (see annex B). However, for Hindi the
top performance comes from a traditional machine learning system. Even for the
other two languages, we can observe that some of the few non-Deep Learning
systems lead to a performance quite close to the top performance. For example,
Team A3-108 [23] reaches a result close to the top performance for the Hindi sub-
task B. Also the run IRLAB@IITBHU [2] achieves a higher weighted F1 value
than the top run for sub-task B for English. It seems that the size of HASOC
is small enough that traditional approaches can still prevail. There might not
be enough data to train Deep architectures with many parameters. Future im-
provement for such systems might lie in the intelligent use of external resources.
Participants were allowed to use external resources and other datasets for this
task. For German, this seems to have boosted the top performing team LSV-UdS
for the sub-task B for which only few training examples were available.
Several teams have adopted an open code policy and published their code in
Github repositories. This policy allows repeat-ability and reproducibility of the
experiments.
8 Performance Analysis
Some of the participants have conducted an interesting analysis in order to
explore the behavior of their systems. We tried to explore the performance of all
systems on each tweet. We ranked the tweets for sub-task A in English based
on the number of systems that classified them. The following figure shows the
distribution of the values.
We can observe that only 30% of the systems agree a post is an offensive (class
HOF) considering the Median. On the other hand, 70% of the systems vote for
NOT in the Median for the class NOT. However, the distributions are quite
scattered. This shows that for the systems there seem to be no clear and obvious
S. Modha et al.
Fig. 12. Box-plot of the percentage of systems votes for tweets for English sub-task A
cases. Considering the analysis of Salminen et al. in which humans agreed much
on obvious Hate Speech tweets [35], there seems to be less agreement by systems.
As a consequence, voting approaches might not work well. Another consequence
could be that it is hard to explain and understand the decision of a classifier in
this domain. This may lead to a lack of ability to explain decisions and a lack
of transparency. This can result in a low degree of acceptance in society. More
analysis of the results is necessary for the future.
9 Conclusion and Outlook
The submissions for HASOC have shown that deep learning representations
seem to be the state of the art approach for Hate Speech classification. After
analyzing the results, the best method for Hate speech classification is dependent
on the corpus language, classification granularities, and distribution of each class-
labels. In other words balance, an unbalanced training dataset might affect the
performance of the classification system. In the long run, the HASOC track aims
at supporting researchers to develop robust technology which can cope with
multilingual data and to develop transfer learning approaches that can exploit
learning data across languages. For future editions, we envision the integration of
further languages. The potential bias in the data collection needs to be analyzed
and monitored [43].
10 Acknowledgements
We thank all participants for their submissions and the work involved. We thank
all the jurors who labeled the tweets in a short period of time. We also thank
the FIRE organizers for their support in organizing the track.
HASOC 2019 Overview
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A Appendix
A.1 Annotation Guidelines for HASOC 2019
HATE SPEECH Ascribing negative attributes or deficiencies to groups of indi-
viduals because they are members of a group (e.g. all poor people are stupid).
Hateful comment toward groups because of race, political opinion, sexual orien-
tation, gender, social status, health condition or similar.
OFFENSIVE Degrading, dehumanizing or insulting an individual. Threatening
with violent acts.
PROFANITY Unacceptable language in the absence of insults and abuse. This
typically concerns the usage of swearwords (Scheiße, Fuck etc.) and cursing (Zur
Ho¨lle! Verdammt! etc.).
OTHER Normal content, statements, or anything else. If the utterances are
considered to be “normal” and not offending to anyone, they should not be
labeled. This could be part of youth language or other language registers.
We expect most posts to be OTHER, some to be HATE and the other two
categories to be less frequent.
Dubious cases which are difficult to decide even for humans, should be left
out.
HASOC 2019 Overview
B Appendix
B.1 Systems and Approaches at HASOC 2019
The following tables summarize the approaches used by the teams. The last
col-umn has an entry when the team compared several approaches and clearly
identi-fied a best one. The first table shows the approaches which used technology
without Deep Learning or for which a traditional approaches performed best.
The second table shows the approaches which used Deep Learning.
Table 16. Participants Team Approaches : based on traditional classifiers
Team name Affiliation Text Representa-
tion and Classifier
Best run
(when appli-
cable)
DEEP [24] Benha Univ.,
Egypt & Manga-
lore Univ.
TF/IDF weighting,
SVM, MLP
SVM
IRLAB@IITBHU [2] IIT Varanasi SVM, Xboost SVM
A3-108 [23] IIIT-Hyderabad Several Word
and character n-
grams, Length of
tweet, SVM, Ada-
Boost, Random
Forest,LSTM
ML instead of
Deep Learning
DA Master [26] DAIICT TFIDF, log. Regres-
sion;, CNN
TFIDF, log. Re-
gression
DLRG [28] Vellore Institute of
Technology, Chen-
nai
TF/IDF, Ensemble Random Forest
UACh-INAOE [8] Univ. Autonoma
Chihuahua & In-
stit. National de
Astrofisica
Word and character
n-grams, Word em-
beddings, Clustering,
Flesch Scores, NER
count, LR, SVM
Word and char-
acter n-gram fre-
quencies, LR
Hate Monitors [34] IIT Kharagpur BERT, LASER,
Light Gradient
Boosting
Light Gradient
Boosting
Dracarys [41] IIT Bombay & Ap-
ple
CNN, SVM SVM
S. Modha et al.
Table 17. participants Team Approaches : based on Deep neural model & Transfer
Learning
Team name Affiliation Text Representa-
tion and Classifier
Best run
(when appli-
cable)
AI ML NIT [17] IIT Patna CNN, fastText fastText, one-
Hot
Amrita [37] Amrita Vishwa
Vidyapeetham
CNN, LSTM fast-
Text
LGI2P [13] Univ Montpellier fastText
CIT Kokrajhar [33] University of Ed-
monton & CIT
Kokrajhar
LSTM LSTM
YNU wb [6] Yunnan Univ. ON-LSTM, Atten-
tion mechanism,
K-folding, Ensemble
ON-LSTM
QutNocturnal [4] Queensland Univ.
of Technology,
Brisbane
LSTM, DNN,SVM,
kNN. Boosting
CNN,Transfer
learning
QMUL-NLP [15] Queen Mary Univ.
London
TFIDF, Word2Vec,
LSTM
Word2Vec &
LSTM
am905771 [20] IIT Varanasi Glove, Bi
LSTM,Attention
Glove Twitter
IIITG-ADBU [3] IIIT Guwahati, &
IBM Research In-
dia
ELMO, GLOVE,
fastText, log. Re-
gression, SVM,
BiLSTM
fastText , BiL-
STM
Vito [25] Univ. Polite´cnica
de Valencia
POS tagging,CNN,
BiLSTM,
Ensemble
TheNorth [27] Lule˚a University
of Technology,
Sweden
Bi-LSTM Bi-LSTM
FALSE Positive [16] IIIT Guwahati Stacked BiLSTM;
CNN
RALIGRAPH [19] Univ. of Montral BERT, Graph
CNNPre-trained
with external Founta
corpus
VCGN-BERT
3Idiots [21] Univ. of Illinois &
IIT Kanpur
BERT, All 3 tasks in
one
BERT cased
BRUMS [29] Univ of Wolver-
hampton,
Rochester In-
stitute of Techn. &
Birmingham City
Univ
Several deep learn-
ing architectures
including LSTM,
GRU, Attention, 2D
Convolution,light
pre-processing
BERT
KMI-Panlingua [31] Bhimrao Ambed-
kar Univ. & Pan-
lingua & Charles
Univ. Prague
BERT, Char and
word ngrams + SVM
BERT
LSV-UdS [10] Saarland Univer-
sity
BERT,
SVM,External
collections
BERT
学霸联盟
