Sentiment-Enhanced Cyberbullying Detection Models on Social Media Platforms
Adamu Gaston Philipo, Jianguo Ding, Doreen Sebastian Sarwatt, Jumanne Ally Mohamed, Afidhu Swaibu Yusufu, Mahmoud Daneshmand, Huansheng Ning · ACM Transactions on the Web · 2025
Cyberbullying on social media platforms remains a serious threat to digital well-being, requiring intelligent systems capable of detecting both explicit and subtle, emotionally charged abuse. Sentiment analysis (SA) plays a key role by interpreting emotional tone, polarity, and context, offering more nuanced and timely detection than keyword-based models. Emotions like anger, sarcasm, or veiled hostility often precede cyberbullying, especially during impulsive interactions. SA captures these affective cues, improving sensitivity to implicit abuse and coded language. This study presents the first systematic comparison of sentiment-enhanced transformer models such as ALBERT, DeBERTa, ELECTRA, HateBERT, and DeepSeek-coder-1.3b-base, fine-tuned for cyberbullying detection across Twitter (currently X), IMDB, and Amazon. Models were evaluated on predictive performance (Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1-score), time and cost efficiency (inference time, memory, CPU/GPU use, and energy). ELECTRA + SA outperformed all models, achieving 91.85% accuracy, precision, and recall, and a 91.84% F1-score. It also excelled in efficiency, with 0.069 seconds inference time, 23.92 MB RAM use, 7.2% CPU/GPU usage, and 0.000075 kWh energy consumption, proving highly generalizable, sentiment-sensitive, and suitable for real-time, resource-aware deployment. These results highlight the importance of sentiment integration, dataset diversity, and computational efficiency in building scalable, real-world cyberbullying detection systems.