Offensive Language Detection in Arabizi

Detecting offensive language in under-resourced languages presents a significant real-world challenge for social media platforms. This paper is the first work focused on the issue of offensive language detection in Arabizi, an under-explored topic in an under-resourced form of Arabic. For the first time, a comprehensive and critical overview of the existing work on the topic is presented. In addition, we carry out experiments using different BERT-like models and show the feasibility of detecting offensive language in Arabizi with high accuracy. Throughout a thorough analysis of results, we emphasize the complexities introduced by dialect variations and out-of-domain generalization. We use in our experiments a dataset that we have constructed by leveraging existing, albeit limited, resources. To facilitate further research, we make this dataset publicly accessible to the research community.