Yahoo Has a Tool that Can Catch Online Abuse Surprisingly Well

f our e-mail inboxes can be kept relatively spam-free, why can’t machines automatically purge abusive messages from tweets or comments?... a way of representing the meaning of words as vectors with many dimensions... “word embedding,” allows semantics to be processed in a sophisticated way. For instance, even if a comment contains a string of words that have not been identified as abusive, the representations of that string in vector space may be enough to identify it as such... the team was able to identify abusive messages (from its own data set) with roughly 90 percent accuracy... we might not want an automated solution: “In a world where what we read is increasingly dictated by algorithms and filters, we ought to be careful about demanding more computer interference.”