AI-Based Hate Speech Detection in Albanian Social Media: New Dataset and Mobile Web Application Integration

This paper aims to advance AI-based hate speech (HS) detection in the Albanian language, which is resource-limited in natural language processing (NLP). Addressing the challenge of limited data, we developed a human-annotated dataset of over 11,000 comments, carefully curated from various Albanian social media platforms, containing a substantial number of HS instances. The dataset was annotated using a detailed two-layer taxonomy to capture the complex dimensions of HS. To ensure high-quality annotations, three expert annotators applied a majority voting system, achieving a substantial Fleiss’s kappa coefficient of 0.62, underscoring the reliability and consistency of the annotations. We conducted a comparative analysis of several machine learning (ML) algorithms, including support vector machine (SVM), Naïve Bayes (NB), XGBoost, and random forest (RF), paired with various text vectorisation techniques and pre-processing methods. In binary classification, the NB model with term frequencyinverse document frequency (TF-IDF) vectorization achieved the highest performance, with an F1 score of 0.80. For multiclass classification, XGBoost outperformed other models, achieving an F1 score of 0.77. Interestingly, our experiments revealed that pre-processing steps generally reduced model performance, suggesting that raw text inputs work better for the Albanian language. Through error analysis using local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME), we identified key challenges, such as polysemy and irony, which contributed to misclassifications. To demonstrate the practical applicability of our work, we developed a user-friendly mobile web application based on the best-performing model, providing realtime HS detection with the potential for integration into social media platforms.