The potentially detrimental effects of cyberbullying have led to the development of numerous automated, data-driven approaches, with emphasis on classification accuracy. Cyberbullying, as a form of abusive online behavior, although not well-defined, is a repetitive process, i.e., a sequence of aggressive messages sent from a bully to a victim over a period of time with the intent to harm the victim. Existing work has focused on harassment (i.e., using profanity to classify toxic comments independently) as an indicator of cyberbullying, disregarding the repetitive nature of this harassing process. However, raising a cyberbullying alert immediately after an aggressive comment is detected can lead to a high number of false positives. At the same time, two key practical challenges remain unaddressed: (i) detection timeliness, which is necessary to support victims as early as possible, and (ii) scalability to the staggering rates at which content is generated in online social networks. In this work, we introduce
CONcISE
, a novel approach for timely and accurate Cyberbullying detectiON in online social media SEssions.
CONcISE
is a two-stage online approach designed to reduce the time to raise a cyberbullying alert by sequentially examining comments as they become available over time, and minimizing the number of feature evaluations necessary for a decision to be made for each comment. Extensive experiments on a real-world Instagram dataset with
users and
comments demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability, and timeliness of our approach and its benefits over existing methods. Additional experiments using a Twitter dataset offer evidence in support of the potential generalizability of
CONcISE
to other social media platforms.
A Novel Approach for Image based Cyberbullying Detection and Prevention
