The increase in the use of abusive language on social media and virtual platforms has emphasized the importance of developing efficient hate speech detection systems. While there have been considerable advancements in creating such systems for the English language, resources are scarce for other languages, such as Serbian. This research paper explores the use of machine learning and deep learning techniques to identify abusive language in Serbian text. The authors used AbCoSER, a dataset of Serbian tweets that have been labeled as abusive or non-abusive. They evaluated various algorithms to classify tweets, and the best-performing model is based on the deep learning transformer architecture. The model attained an F1 macro score of 0.827, a figure that is commensurate with the benchmarks established for offensive speech datasets of a similar magnitude in other languages.

This paper presents our work on the refinement and improvement of the Serbian language part of Hurtlex, a multilingual lexicon of words to hurt. We pay special attention to adding Multi-word expressions that can be seen as abusive, as such lexical entries are very important in obtaining good results in a plethora of abusive language detection tasks. We use Serbian morphological dictionaries as a basis for data cleaning and MWE dictionary creation. A connection to other lexical and semantic resources in Serbian is outlined and building of abusive language detection systems based on that connection is foreseen.