Comparative analysis of deep learning based Afaan Oromo hate speech detection

Abstract Social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are banking on developing machine learning models to help stop the spread of hateful speech on their platforms. The idea is that machine learning models that utilize natural language processing will detect hate speech faster and better than people can. Despite numerous progress has been made for resource reach language, only a few attempts have been made for Ethiopian Languages such as Afaan Oromo. This paper examines the viability of deep learning models for Afaan Oromo hate speech recognition. Toward this, the biggest dataset of hate speech was collected and annotated by the language experts. Variations of profound deep learning models such as CNN, LSTMs, BiLSTMs, LSTM, GRU, and CNN-LSTM are examined to evaluate their viability in identifying Afaan Oromo Hate speeches. The result uncovers that the model dependent on CNN and Bi-LSTM outperforms all the other investigated models with an average F1-score of 87%.