Inducing a Lexicon of Abusive Words – a Feature-Based Approach

Michael Wiegand, Josef Ruppenhofer, Anna Schmidt, Clayton Greenberg

Abstract: We address the detection of abusive words. The task is to identify such words among a set of negative polar expressions. We propose novel features employing information from both corpora and lexical resources. These features are calibrated on a small manually annotated base lexicon which we use to produce a large lexicon. We show that the word-level information we learn cannot be equally derived from a large dataset of annotated microposts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our (domain-independent) lexicon in the cross-domain detection of abusive microposts.