The use of hate speech targeting ethnicity, nationalities, religious identities, and specific groups has been on the rise in the news media. However, most existing automatic hate speech detection models focus on identifying hate speech, often neglecting the target group-specific language that is common in news articles. To address this problem, we first compile a hate speech dataset, TurkishHatePrintCorpus, derived from Turkish news articles and annotate it specifically for the language related to the targeted group. We then introduce the HateTargetBERT model, which integrates the target-centric linguistic features extracted in this study into the BERT model, and demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting hate speech while allowing the model’s classification decision to be explained. We have made the dataset and source code publicly available at url{https://github.com/boun-tabi/HateTargetBERT-TR}.

Discriminatory language, in particular hate speech, is a global problem posing a grave threat to democracy and human rights. Yet, it is not always easy to identify, as it is rarely explicit. In order to detect hate speech, we developed Hierarchical Attention Network (HAN) based and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) based deep learning models to capture the changing discursive cues and understand the context around the discourse. In addition, we designed linguistic features using critical discourse analysis techniques and integrated them into these neural network models. We studied the compatibility of our model with the hate speech detection problem by comparing it with traditional machine learning models, as well as a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) based model, a Convolutional Neural Network-Gated Recurrent Unit (CNN-GRU) based model which reached significant performance results for hate speech detection. Our results on a manually annotated corpus of print media in Turkish show that the proposed approach is effective for hate speech detection. We believe that the feature sets created for the Turkish language will encourage new studies in the quantitative analysis of hate speech.