Enhancing Hate Speech Detection in the Digital Age: A Novel Model Fusion Approach Leveraging a Comprehensive Dataset

In the era of digital communication, social media platforms have experienced exponential growth, becoming primary channels for information exchange. However, this surge has also amplified the rapid spread of hate speech, prompting extensive research efforts for effective mitigation. These efforts have prominently featured advanced natural language processing techniques, particularly emphasizing deep learning methods that have shown promising outcomes. This article presents a novel approach to address this pressing issue, combining a comprehensive dataset of 18 sources. It includes 0.45 million comments sourced from various digital platforms spanning different time frames. There were two models utilized to address the diversity in the data and leverage distinct strengths found within deep learning frameworks: CNN and BiLSTM with an attention mechanism. These models were tailored to handle specific subsets of the data, allowing for a more targeted approach. The unique outputs from both models were then fused into a unified model. This methodology outperformed recent models, showcasing enhanced generalization capabilities even when tested on the largest and most diverse dataset. Our model achieved an impressive accuracy of 89%, while maintaining a high precision of 0.88 and recall of 0.91.