Detection of Hate Speech and Offensive Language in Arabic Text: A Systematic Literature Review

Social media sites facilitate users’ discussions, expression of opinions, sharing of information and news, and promotion of ideas and products, thus rapidly increasing the volume of hate speech and offensive content on online platforms. Consequently, hate speech and offensive content have turned out to be a widespread issue that negatively affects both individuals and society and needs to be controlled through detection and removal. This paper aims to provide a further understanding of the meaning of hate speech and offensive language and to provide a comprehensive discussion of the various techniques to detect hate speech and offensive language. A systematic literature review (SLR) of 90 research papers published between 2018 and 2024 was conducted to discover gaps within the literature. This review revealed challenges and possibilities for further development and improvement of previous findings. The results show that most of these works classified hate speech and offensive language using techniques from machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), and the most common performance metrics were Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F‐measure. The benchmark datasets are also described. Twitter was the most commonly utilized social network for obtaining datasets, while Facebook is sometimes used. Moreover, the findings of this review offer insight into research trends in Arabic hate speech and offensive language, as well as new research directions. The most interesting finding is that until now most Social Media Network Developers have not included autodetection of hate speech or offensive language plugins. Finally, this study presents a guideline for choosing the best strategies and techniques to detect and predict Arabic offensive language and hate speech.