Algorithmically supported moderation in children's online communities

The moderation of harassment and cyberbullying on online platforms has become a heavily publicized issue in the past few years. Popular websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube employ human moderators to moderate user-generated con- tent. In this thesis, we propose an automated approach to the moderation of online conversational text authored by children on the Scratch website, a drag-and-drop programming interface and online community. We develop a corpus of children's comments annotated for inappropriate material, the first of its kind. To produce the corpus of data, we introduce a comment moderation website that allows for the review and label of comments. The web-tool acts as a data-pipeline, designed to keep the machine learning models up to date with new forms of inappropriate content and to reduce the need for maintaining a blacklist of profane words. Finally, we apply natural language processing and machine learning techniques towards detecting inappropriate content from the Scratch website, achieving an F1-score of 73%.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Tan, Flora, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Andrew Sliwinski and Mitch Resnick.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113097

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/113097