Safeguarding Online Spaces: A Powerful Fusion of Federated Learning, Word Embeddings, and Emotional Features for Cyberbullying Detection

Cyberbullying has emerged as a pervasive issue in the digital age, necessitating advanced techniques for effective detection and mitigation. This research explores the integration of word embeddings, emotional features, and federated learning to address the challenges of centralized data processing and user privacy concerns prevalent in previous methods. Word embeddings capture semantic relationships and contextual information, enabling a more nuanced understanding of text data, while emotional features derived from text extend the analysis to encompass the affective dimension, enhancing cyberbullying identification. Federated learning, a decentralized learning paradigm, offers a compelling solution to centralizing sensitive user data by enabling collaborative model training across distributed devices, preserving privacy while harnessing collective intelligence. In this study, we conduct an in-depth investigation into the fusion of word embeddings, emotional features, and federated learning, complemented by the utilization of BERT, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Deep Neural Networks (DNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models. Hyperparameters and neural architecture are explored to find optimal configurations, leading to the generation of superior results. These techniques are applied in the context of cyberbullying detection, using publicly available multi-platform (social media) cyberbullying datasets. Through extensive experiments and evaluations, our proposed framework demonstrates superior performance and robustness compared to traditional methods. The results illustrate the enhanced ability to identify and combat cyberbullying incidents effectively, contributing to the creation of safer online environments. Particularly, the BERT model consistently outperforms other deep learning models (CNN, DNN, LSTM) in cyberbullying detection while preserving the privacy of local datasets for each social platform through our improved federated learning setup. We have provided Differential Privacy based security analysis for the proposed method to further strengthen the privacy and robustness of the system. By leveraging word embeddings, emotional features, and federated learning, this research opens new avenues in cyberbullying research, paving the way for proactive intervention and support mechanisms. The comprehensive approach presented herein highlights the substantial strengths and advantages of this integrated methodology, setting a foundation for future advancements in cyberbullying detection and mitigation.