Cyberbullying Detection in Social Networks: A Comparison Between Machine Learning and Transfer Learning Approaches

Information and Communication Technologies fueled social networking and facilitated communication. However, cyberbullying on the platform had detrimental ramifications. The user-dependent mechanisms like reporting, blocking, and removing bullying posts online is manual and ineffective. Bag-of-words text representation without metadata limited cyberbullying post text classification. This research developed an automatic system for cyberbullying detection with two approaches: Conventional Machine Learning and Transfer Learning. This research adopted AMiCA data encompassing significant amount of cyberbullying context and structured annotation process. Textual, sentiment and emotional, static and contextual word embeddings, psycholinguistics, term lists, and toxicity features were used in the conventional Machine Learning approach. This study was the first to use toxicity features to detect cyberbullying. This study is also the first to use the latest psycholinguistics features from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word (LIWC) 2022 tool, as well as Empath’s lexicon, to detect cyberbullying. The contextual embeddings of ggeluBert, tnBert, and DistilBert have alike performance, however DistilBert embeddings were elected for higher F-measure. Textual features, DistilBert embeddings, and toxicity features that struck new benchmark were the top three unique features when fed individually. The model’s performance was boosted to F-measure of 64.8% after feeding with a combination of textual, sentiment, DistilBert embeddings, psycholinguistics, and toxicity features to the Logistic Regression model that outperforms Linear SVC with faster training time and efficient handling of high-dimensionality features. Transfer Learning approach was by fine-tuning optimized version Pre-trained Language Models namely, DistilBert, DistilRoBerta, and Electra-small which were found to have speedier training computation than their base form. The fine-tuned DistilBert resulted with the highest F-measure of 72.42%, surpassing CML. Our research concluded that Transfer Learning was the best for uplifted performance and lesser effort as feature engineering and resampling was omitted.