Should we stay silent on violence? An ensemble approach to detect violent incidents in Spanish social media texts

Abstract There has been a steep rise in user-generated content on the Web and social media platforms during the last few years. While the ease of content creation allows anyone to create content, at the same time it is difficult to monitor and control the spread of detrimental content. Recent research in natural language processing and machine learning has shown some hope for the purpose. Approaches and methods are now being developed for the automatic flagging of problematic textual content, namely hate speech, cyberbullying, or fake news, though mostly for English language texts. This paper presents an algorithmic approach based on deep learning models for the detection of violent incidents from tweets in the Spanish language (binary classification) and categorizes them further into five classes – accident, homicide, theft, kidnapping, and none (multi-label classification). The performance is evaluated on the recently shared benchmark dataset, and it is found that the proposed approach outperforms the various deep learning models, with a weighted average precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.82, 0.81, and 0.80, respectively, for the binary classification. Similarly, for the multi-label classification, the proposed model reports weighted average precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.54, 0.79, and 0.64, respectively, which is also superior to the existing results reported in the literature. The study, thus, presents meaningful contribution to detection of violent incidents in Spanish language social media posts.