Detecting Cyberbullying Using Latent Semantic Indexing

Cyberbullying has proven consequential to youth Internet users and previous methods relied heavily on the use of manually developed dictionaries. This project describes preliminary results for a system that uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for the detection of cyberbullying in a labeled collection of posts from Formspring.me. After preprocessing to account for variations in spelling and use of emoticons, a search system was developed. Our system significantly outperforms the baseline with a very simple query and is not dependent on a dictionary of bullying terms.