AI Enabled User-Specific Cyberbullying Severity Detection with Explainability

Abstract: The rise of social media has significantly increased the prevalence of cyberbullying (CB), posing serious risks to both mental and physical well-being. Effective detection systems are essential for mitigating its impact. While several ML models have been developed, few incorporate victims' psychological, demographic, and behavioral factors alongside bullying comments to assess severity. In this study, we propose an AI model intregrating user-specific attributes, including psychological factors (self-esteem, anxiety, depression), online behavior (internet usage, disciplinary history), and demographic attributes (race, gender, ethnicity), along with social media comments. Additionally, we introduce a re-labeling technique that categorizes social media comments into three severity levels: Not Bullying, Mild Bullying, and Severe Bullying, considering user-specific factors.Our LSTM model is trained using 146 features, incorporating emotional, topical, and word2vec representations of social media comments as well as user-level attributes and it outperforms existing baseline models, achieving the highest accuracy of 98\% and an F1-score of 0.97. To identify key factors influencing the severity of cyberbullying, we employ explainable AI techniques (SHAP and LIME) to interpret the model's decision-making process. Our findings reveal that, beyond hate comments, victims belonging to specific racial and gender groups are more frequently targeted and exhibit higher incidences of depression, disciplinary issues, and low self-esteem. Additionally, individuals with a prior history of bullying are at a greater risk of becoming victims of cyberbullying.