Integrating Sentiment Analysis With Machine Learning for Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media

The phenomenon of cyberbullying has emerged as a critical challenge in the digital landscape which poses detrimental effects on individuals and broader societal frameworks. A viable approach to addressing this pervasive issue lies in the accurate identification of cyberbullying within social media a...

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Main Authors: Maram Fahaad Almufareh, Noor Zaman Jhanjhi, Mamoona Humayun, Ghadah Naif Alwakid, Danish Javed, Saleh Naif Almuayqil
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10955379/
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author Maram Fahaad Almufareh
Noor Zaman Jhanjhi
Mamoona Humayun
Ghadah Naif Alwakid
Danish Javed
Saleh Naif Almuayqil
author_facet Maram Fahaad Almufareh
Noor Zaman Jhanjhi
Mamoona Humayun
Ghadah Naif Alwakid
Danish Javed
Saleh Naif Almuayqil
author_sort Maram Fahaad Almufareh
collection DOAJ
description The phenomenon of cyberbullying has emerged as a critical challenge in the digital landscape which poses detrimental effects on individuals and broader societal frameworks. A viable approach to addressing this pervasive issue lies in the accurate identification of cyberbullying within social media as it constitutes a substantial portion of digital interactions. State-of-the-art solutions predominantly rely on pre-trained language models and machine learning algorithms; however, these methods are often associated with substantial computational overheads and the development of advanced cyberbullying detection algorithms remains limited. This paper presents a unique framework that integrates sentiment analysis with machine learning algorithms to enhance the detection of cyberbullying on social media. Sentiment analysis explores the linguistic and emotional characteristics of cyberbullying messages which helps the framework to identify key sentiment indicators that differentiate harmful interactions from benign ones. Furthermore, we provide the most optimal text preprocessing steps which are ordered in a way that improves text quality for cyberbullying detection. These steps ensure high-quality input data for machine learning models which significantly enhances their performance. Additionally, we tackle the challenge of penta-class imbalanced data by incorporating resampling within the framework without causing bias. We employ several machine learning algorithms within the framework, the Extra Tree classifier achieved the best results with an accuracy of 95.38% and F1 score of 0.95. The results demonstrate that the integration of sentiment analysis significantly improves classification accuracy compared to conventional methods for the task of cyberbullying detection.
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spelling doaj-art-aa1b74d41ec34894905a971c4a75c2f52025-08-20T02:28:15ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362025-01-0113783487835910.1109/ACCESS.2025.355884310955379Integrating Sentiment Analysis With Machine Learning for Cyberbullying Detection on Social MediaMaram Fahaad Almufareh0https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6613-0831Noor Zaman Jhanjhi1https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8116-4733Mamoona Humayun2https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6339-2257Ghadah Naif Alwakid3https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2708-2064Danish Javed4https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6796-5857Saleh Naif Almuayqil5https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5696-7198Department of Information Systems, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Jouf University, Sakaka, Saudi ArabiaSchool of Computer Science, Taylor’s University, Lakeside Campus, Subang Jaya, Selangor, MalaysiaDepartment of Computing, School of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Roehampton London, London, U.K.Department of Computer Science, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Jouf University, Sakaka, Saudi ArabiaSchool of Computer Science, Taylor’s University, Lakeside Campus, Subang Jaya, Selangor, MalaysiaDepartment of Information Systems, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Jouf University, Sakaka, Saudi ArabiaThe phenomenon of cyberbullying has emerged as a critical challenge in the digital landscape which poses detrimental effects on individuals and broader societal frameworks. A viable approach to addressing this pervasive issue lies in the accurate identification of cyberbullying within social media as it constitutes a substantial portion of digital interactions. State-of-the-art solutions predominantly rely on pre-trained language models and machine learning algorithms; however, these methods are often associated with substantial computational overheads and the development of advanced cyberbullying detection algorithms remains limited. This paper presents a unique framework that integrates sentiment analysis with machine learning algorithms to enhance the detection of cyberbullying on social media. Sentiment analysis explores the linguistic and emotional characteristics of cyberbullying messages which helps the framework to identify key sentiment indicators that differentiate harmful interactions from benign ones. Furthermore, we provide the most optimal text preprocessing steps which are ordered in a way that improves text quality for cyberbullying detection. These steps ensure high-quality input data for machine learning models which significantly enhances their performance. Additionally, we tackle the challenge of penta-class imbalanced data by incorporating resampling within the framework without causing bias. We employ several machine learning algorithms within the framework, the Extra Tree classifier achieved the best results with an accuracy of 95.38% and F1 score of 0.95. The results demonstrate that the integration of sentiment analysis significantly improves classification accuracy compared to conventional methods for the task of cyberbullying detection.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10955379/Cyberbullying detectionsentiment analysismachine learningresampling
spellingShingle Maram Fahaad Almufareh
Noor Zaman Jhanjhi
Mamoona Humayun
Ghadah Naif Alwakid
Danish Javed
Saleh Naif Almuayqil
Integrating Sentiment Analysis With Machine Learning for Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media
IEEE Access
Cyberbullying detection
sentiment analysis
machine learning
resampling
title Integrating Sentiment Analysis With Machine Learning for Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media
title_full Integrating Sentiment Analysis With Machine Learning for Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media
title_fullStr Integrating Sentiment Analysis With Machine Learning for Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media
title_full_unstemmed Integrating Sentiment Analysis With Machine Learning for Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media
title_short Integrating Sentiment Analysis With Machine Learning for Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media
title_sort integrating sentiment analysis with machine learning for cyberbullying detection on social media
topic Cyberbullying detection
sentiment analysis
machine learning
resampling
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10955379/
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