Using AI-Based Virtual Companions to Assist Adolescents with Autism in Recognizing and Addressing Cyberbullying

Social media platforms and online gaming sites play a pervasive role in facilitating peer interaction and social development for adolescents, but they also pose potential threats to health and safety. It is crucial to tackle cyberbullying issues within these platforms to ensure the healthy social development of adolescents. Cyberbullying has been linked to adverse mental health outcomes among adolescents, including anxiety, depression, academic underperformance, and an increased risk of suicide. While cyberbullying is a concern for all adolescents, those with disabilities are particularly susceptible and face a higher risk of being targets of cyberbullying. Our research addresses these challenges by introducing a personalized online virtual companion guided by artificial intelligence (AI). The web-based virtual companion's interactions aim to assist adolescents in detecting cyberbullying. More specifically, an adolescent with ASD watches a cyberbullying scenario in a virtual environment, and the AI virtual companion then asks the adolescent if he/she detected cyberbullying. To inform the virtual companion in real time to know if the adolescent has learned about detecting cyberbullying, we have implemented fast and lightweight cyberbullying detection models employing the T5-small and MobileBERT networks. Our experimental results show that we obtain comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods despite having a compact architecture.