Abstract:
Hate speech is a critical problem in Ethiopia and around the world and is disseminated
using different social media platforms. In the world, as social media users increase, hate
speech dissemination increases rapidly in parallel. To overcome the dissemination of hate
speech, social media platforms have the responsibility of controlling users. In Ethiopia, to
control hate speech dissemination, a hate speech proclamation has been declared.
However, the dissemination of hate speech is still a critical problem in the country. In this
research, to help limit hate speech dissemination, we build an automatic hate speech
detection model. The main focus of the research is building a hate speech detection
model using sentiment analysis and demonstrating a correlation between sentiment
analysis and hate speech. We develop a hate speech detection model for the Amharic
language using machine learning and deep learning techniques. Moreover, we investigate
the impact of sentiment analysis on hate speech on social media. We find out that most of
the hate speech content originated from negative sentiment. The experiment is performed
using both machine learning and deep learning approaches. In the experiment with
human-annotated datasets, Random Forest from the machine learning model and BiLSTM from the deep learning model performed with 0.79 and 0.82 accuracies
respectively. While in the hate speech detection model trained, tested, and validated using
both human-annotated and sentiment model-annotated datasets, LSTM and Bi-LSTM
perform with 0.53 and 0.82 accuracies respectively. Hence, the hate speech detection
model built by incorporating sentiment analysis has good performance using the BiLSTM approach. The main contributions of this work include the findings that the
developing automatic hate speech detection model incorporates sentiment analysis, a
multi-class labeled dataset, and a hate speech annotation guideline.
Key Words: - Hate speech detection model, sentiment analysis, deep learning, Amharic
language, hate speech, multi-tasking.