IIT Patna develops software to detect hate speech, prevent its propagations

The software module called Hate, Hyperpartisan, and Hyperpluralism Elicitation and Observer System – or, HELIOS – was built by the AI-NLP-ML Group in the department of computer science and engineering (CSE).

IIT Patna develops software to detect hate speech, prevent its propogation

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna in collaboration with Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi and University of Texas, Austin has developed a software module called Hate to detect hate speech and prevent its propagation. The software module called Hate, Hyperpartisan, and Hyperpluralism Elicitation and Observer System – or, HELIOS – was built by the AI-NLP-ML Group in the department of computer science and engineering (CSE).

The software module uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) – the terms from which the IIT Patna research group draws its name – to identify hate on a page of text, including social media posts, and sanitise it.

“With the rise in hate speech issues in India, how do you detect the offensive content and ensure it is stopped at that time? If you let hate speech propagate, there can be serious situations in maintaining law and order. Lately, the amount of hate or offensive comments targeting certain people has increased tremendously. The question is, how do you detect this because 50 million tweets or posts are generated daily globally. Out of this, two-to-three percent is hate content. How do you filter it out so that you can control the offensive content on the platforms?," said Asif Ekbal who is leading the project at IIT Patna.

The team had started planning the project in 2019 and had been looking for collaborations. Finally, in 2020, they partnered with Wipro to build a commercially viable product to solve the problem of hate speech.

“Hate speech is always targeted at someone or something and we wanted to identify this content by using AI-NLP-ML-based technique, developed at IIT P,” said Ekbal. 

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