Faculty Publications

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  • Item
    Fake News Detection Using Machine Learning Algorithms
    (Association for Computing Machinery, 2022) Imbwaga, J.L.; Chittaragi, N.; Koolagudi, S.G.
    There has been an exponential growth in users sharing news and information in real-time on various social media platforms worldwide. However, few of the users share fake and misleading news for various reasons. The reasons for sharing fake news may not be limited to financial, personal, and/or political gain. Since users cannot determine or censor the type of content that appears on their respective platforms, fake news can pose significant and detrimental effects on an individual and society at large. In this regard, we have proposed the work with the primary objective of development of a fake news detection system by applying supervised machine learning algorithms on an annotated (labeled) dataset. The dataset was selected from Kaggle, consisting of fake news with 23503 entries and true news with 21418 entries. An overall better accuracies are observed with tree-based decision tree classifiers and a gradient boosting ensemble algorithm. © 2022 ACM.
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    Automatic hate speech detection in audio using machine learning algorithms
    (Springer, 2024) Imbwaga, J.L.; Chittaragi, N.B.; Koolagudi, S.G.
    Even though every individual is entitled to freedom of speech, some limitations exist when this freedom is used to target and harm another individual or a group of people, as it translates to hate speech. In this study, the proposed research deals with detection of hate speech for English and Kiswahili languages from audio. The dataset used in this work was collected manually from YouTube videos and then converted to audio. Audio-based features namely spectral, temporal, prosodic and excitation source features were extracted and used to train various machine learning classifiers. Initial experiments were conducted for English language and later on for Kiswahili language. However, it is observed from literature that research activities on Kiswahili language is comparatively lesser. The scores calculated for accuracy, recall, precision, auc and f1 score in detecting hate speech, suggest that Random Forest classifier performed better for English language while the Extreme Gradient Boosting classifier performed better for Kiswahili language. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.
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    Explainable hate speech detection using LIME
    (Springer, 2024) Imbwaga, J.L.; Chittaragi, N.B.; Koolagudi, S.G.
    Free speech is essential, but it can conflict with protecting marginalized groups from harm caused by hate speech. Social media platforms have become breeding grounds for this harmful content. While studies exist to detect hate speech, there are significant research gaps. First, most studies used text data instead of other modalities such as videos or audio. Second, most studies explored traditional machine learning algorithms. However, due to the increase in complexities of computational tasks, there is need to employ complex techniques and methodologies. Third, majority of the research studies have either been evaluated using very few evaluation metrics or not statistically evaluated at all. Lastly, due to the opaque, black-box nature of the complex classifiers, there is need to use explainability techniques. This research aims to address these gaps by detecting hate speech in English and Kiswahili languages using videos manually collected from YouTube. The videos were converted to text and used to train various classifiers. The performance of these classifiers was evaluated using various evaluation and statistical measurements. The experimental results suggest that the random forest classifier achieved the highest results for both languages across all evaluation measurements compared to all classifiers used. The results for English language were: accuracy 98%, AUC 96%, precision 99%, recall 97%, F1 98%, specificity 98% and MCC 96% while the results for Kiswahili language were: accuracy 90%, AUC 94%, precision 93%, recall 92%, F1 94%, specificity 87% and MCC 75%. These results suggest that the random forest classifier is robust, effective and efficient in detecting hate speech in any language. This also implies that the classifier is reliable in detecting hate speech and other related problems in social media. However, to understand the classifiers’ decision-making process, we used the Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) technique to explain the predictions achieved by the random forest classifier. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.