Hurtlex: A multilingual lexicon of words to hurt

We describe the creation of HurtLex, a multilingual lexicon of hate words. The starting point is the Italian hate lexicon developed by the linguist Tullio De Mauro, organized in 17 categories. It has been expanded through the link to available synset-based computational lexical resources such as MultiWordNet and BabelNet, and evolved in a multi-lingual perspective by semiautomatic translation and expert annotation. A twofold evaluation of HurtLex as a resource for hate speech detection in social media is provided: a qualitative evaluation against an Italian annotated Twitter corpus of hate against immigrants, and an extrinsic evaluation in the context of the AMI@Ibereval2018 shared task, where the resource was exploited for extracting domain-specific lexicon-based features for the supervised classification of misogyny in English and Spanish tweets.