Comparative Performance of Machine Learning Algorithms in Cyberbullying Detection: Using Turkish Language Preprocessing Techniques

With the increasing use of the internet and social media, it is obvious that cyberbullying has become a major problem. The most basic way for protection against the dangerous consequences of cyberbullying is to actively detect and control the contents containing cyberbullying. When we look at today's internet and social media statistics, it is impossible to detect cyberbullying contents only by human power. Effective cyberbullying detection methods are necessary in order to make social media a safe communication space. Current research efforts focus on using machine learning for detecting and eliminating cyberbullying. Although most of the studies have been conducted on English texts for the detection of cyberbullying, there are few studies in Turkish. Limited methods and algorithms were also used in studies conducted on the Turkish language. In addition, the scope and performance of the algorithms used to classify the texts containing cyberbullying is different, and this reveals the importance of using an appropriate algorithm. The aim of this study is to compare the performance of different machine learning algorithms in detecting Turkish messages containing cyberbullying. In this study, nineteen different classification algorithms were used to identify texts containing cyberbullying using Turkish natural language processing techniques. Precision, recall, accuracy and F1 score values were used to evaluate the performance of classifiers. It was determined that the Light Gradient Boosting Model (LGBM) algorithm showed the best performance with 90.788% accuracy and 90.949% F1 Score value.