SecondLook : Digital Dating Abuse (Abusive Text Messages ) Dataset

Digital dating abuse is carried out using text messages, emails and social media sites and has become a major mental health crisis among the college-going population. Existing technology and non-technology based intervention programs do not provide assistance at the onset of abuse. The ultimate goal of this project is to create a mobile phone application that can detect digital dating abuse. As a step toward this goal we are investigating the use of machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques to flag text messages as abusive or non-abusive in the context of dating abuse. Due to the lack of a publicly available dataset that could be used to create training and testing sets for the classifiers, we first had to create and validate a dataset of abusive text messages. This paper describes the dataset creation process and the results of an evaluation of different classification and feature extraction techniques used to detect abusive texts. This is the abusive dataset. DOI for the paper :10.1109/ICHI.2018.00039