Offensive Hebrew Corpus and Detection using BERT

Offensive language detection has been well studied in many languages, but it is lagging behind in low-resource languages, such as Hebrew. In this paper, we present a new offensive language corpus in Hebrew. A total of 15,881 tweets were retrieved from Twitter. Each was labeled with one or more of five classes (abusive, hate, violence, pornographic, or none offensive) by Arabic-Hebrew bilingual speakers. The annotation process was challenging as each annotator is expected to be familiar with the Israeli culture, politics, and practices to understand the context of each tweet. We fine-tuned two Hebrew BERT models, HeBERT and AlephBERT, using our proposed dataset and another published dataset. We observed that our data boosts HeBERT performance by 2% when combined with D
OLaH
. Fine-tuning AlephBERT on our data and testing on D
OLaH
yields 69% accuracy, while fine-tuning on D
OLaH
and testing on our data yields 57% accuracy, which may be an indication to the generalizability our data offers. Our dataset and fine-tuned models are available on GitHub and Huggingface.