GSI-UPM at SemEval-2019 Task 5: Semantic Similarity and Word Embeddings for Multilingual Detection of Hate Speech Against Immigrants and Women on Twitter

Abstract: This paper describes the GSI-UPM system for SemEval-2019 Task 5, which tackles multilingual detection of hate speech on Twitter. The main contribution of the paper is the use of a method based on word embeddings and semantic similarity combined with traditional paradigms, such as n-grams, TF-IDF and POS. This combination of several features is fine-tuned through ablation tests, demonstrating the usefulness of different features. While our approach outperforms baseline classifiers on different sub-tasks, the best of our submitted runs reached the 5th position on the Spanish sub-task A.