Abstract
The detection of abusive or offensive remarks in social texts has received significant attention in research. In several related shared tasks, BERT has been shown to be the state-of-the-art. In this paper, we propose to utilize lexical features derived from a hate lexicon towards improving the performance of BERT in such tasks. We explore different ways to utilize the lexical features in the form of lexicon-based encodings at the sentence level or embeddings at the word level. We provide an extensive dataset evaluation that addresses in-domain as well as cross-domain detection of abusive content to render a complete picture. Our results indicate that our proposed models combining BERT with lexical features help improve over a baseline BERT model in many of our in-domain and cross-domain experiments.