Date of Award

Summer 8-2022

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Computer Science

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Kumar, Sathish

Second Advisor

Yu, Chansu

Third Advisor

Yu, Hongkai

Subject Headings

Computer Science

Abstract

Machine learning is a very useful tool to solve issues in multiple domains such as sentiment analysis, fake news detection, facial recognition, and cyberbullying. In this work, we have leveraged its ability to understand the nuances of natural language to detect cyberbullying. We have further utilized it to detect the subject of cyberbullying such as age, gender, ethnicity, and religion. Further, we have built another layer to detect the cases of misogyny in cyberbullying. In one of our experiments, we created a three-layered architecture to detect cyberbullying , then to detect if it is gender based and finally if it is a case of misogyny or not. In each of our experimentation we trained models with support vector machines, RNNLSTM, BERT and distilBERT, and evaluated it using multiple performance measuring parameters like accuracy, bias, mean square error, recall, precision and F1 score to evaluate each model more efficiently in terms of bias and fairness. In addition to fully supervised learning, we also used weakly supervised learning techniques to detect the cyberbullying and its subject during our experimentations. Finally, we compared the performance of models trained using fully supervised learning and weakly supervised learning algorithms. This comparison further demonstrated that using weak supervision we can develop models to handle complex use cases such as cyberbullying. Finally, the thesis document concludes by describing lessons learned, future work recommendations and the concluding remarks.

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