Cross-Platform Evaluation for Italian Hate Speech Detection

Despite the number of approaches recently proposed in NLP for detecting abusive language on social networks, the issue of developing hate speech detection systems that are robust across different platforms is still an unsolved problem. In this paper we perform a comparative evaluation on datasets for hate speech detection in Italian, extracted from four different social media platforms, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp. We show that combining such platform-dependent datasets to take advantage of training data developed for other platforms is beneficial, although their impact varies depending on the social network under consideration.