Programme

Protecting the Vulnerable: Detection and Prevention of Online Grooming

Anna Vartapetiance and Lee Gillam

The 2012 EU Kids Online report revealed that 30% of 9-16 year-olds have made contact online with someone they did not know offline, and 9% have gone to an offline meeting with someone they first met online. The report suggests that this is “rarely harmful”, but is hoping against harm really the wisest course of action? This talk presents details of our ongoing research and development on the prevention and detection of unsavoury activities which involve luring vulnerable people into ongoing abusive relationships. We will focus specifically on online grooming of children, discussing the potential to detect and prevent such grooming, and relevant theories and systems. The talk will address some of the challenges involved with the practical implementation and use of such safeguards, in particular with respect to legal and ethical issues. We conclude by discussing the opportunities for protecting further groups vulnerable to grooming for emotional, financial, or other purposes.

A Web of Hate: Tackling Hateful Speech in Online Social Spaces

Haji Mohammad Saleem, Kelly P Dillon, Susan Benesch and Derek Ruths

Online social platforms are beset with hateful speech - content that expresses hatred for a person or group of people. Such content can frighten, intimidate, or silence platform users, and some of it can inspire other users to commit violence. Despite widespread recognition of the problems posed by such content, reliable solutions even for detecting hateful speech are lacking. In the present work, we establish why keyword-based methods are insufficient for detection. We then propose an approach to detecting hateful speech that uses content produced by self-identifying hateful communities as training data. Our approach bypasses the expensive annotation process often required to train keyword systems and performs well across several established platforms, making substantial improvements over current state-of-the-art approaches.

A Dictionary-based Approach to Racism Detection in Dutch Social Media

Stéphan Tulkens, Lisa Hilte, Elise Lodewyckx, Ben Verhoeven and Walter Daelemans

We present a dictionary-based approach to racism detection in Dutch social media comments, which were retrieved from two public Belgian social media sites likely to attract racist reactions. These comments were labeled as racist or non-racist by multiple annotators. For our approach, three discourse dictionaries were created: first, we created a dictionary by retrieving possibly racist and more neutral terms from the training data, and then augmenting these with more general words to remove some bias. A second dictionary was created through automatic expansion using a word2vec model trained on a large corpus of general Dutch text. Finally, a third dictionary was created by manually filtering out incorrect expansions. We trained multiple Support Vector Machines, using the distribution of words over the different categories in the dictionaries as features. The best-performing model used the manually cleaned dictionary and obtained an F-score of 0.46 for the racist class on a test set consisting of unseen Dutch comments, retrieved from the same sites used for the training set. The automated expansion of the dictionary only slightly boosted the model’s performance, and this increase in performance was not statistically significant. The fact that the coverage of the expanded dictionaries did increase indicates that the words that were automatically added did occur in the corpus, but were not able to meaningfully impact performance. The dictionaries, code, and the procedure for requesting the corpus are available at: https://github.com/clips/hades.

Forensic Investigation of Linguistic Sources of Electronic Scam Mail: A Statistical Language Modelling Approach

Adeola O Opesade, Mutawakilu A Tiamiyu, Tunde Adegbola

Electronic handling of information is one of the defining technologies of the digital age. These same technologies have been exploited by unethical hands in what is now known as cybercrime. Cybercrime is of different types but of importance to the present study is the 419 Scam because it is generally (yet controversially) linked with a particular country - Nigeria. Previous research that attempted to unravel the controversy applied the Internet Protocol address tracing technique. The present study applied the statistical language modelling technique to investigate the propensity of Nigeria’s involvement in authoring these fraudulent mails. Using a hierarchical modelling approach proposed in the study, 28.85% of anonymous electronic scam mails were classified as being from Nigeria among four other countries. The study concluded that linguistic cues have potentials of being used for investigating transnational digital breaches and that electronic scam mail problem cannot be pinned down to Nigeria as believed generally, though Nigeria could be one of the countries that are prominent in authoring such mails.

Android Malware Classification through Analysis of String Literals

Richard Killam, Paul Cook and Natalia Stakhanova

As the popularity of the Android platform grows, the number of malicious apps targeting this platform grows along with it. Accordingly, as the number of malicious apps increases, so too does the need for an automated system which can effectively detect and classify these apps and their families. This paper presents a new system for classifying malware by leveraging the text strings present in an app’s binary files. This approach was tested using over 5,000 apps from 14 different malware families and was able to classify samples with over 99% accuracy while maintaining a false positive rate of 2.0%.

Demystifying Privacy Policies with Language Technologies: Progress and Challenges

Shomir Wilson, Florian Schaub, Aswarth Dara, Sushain K. Cherivirala, Sebastian Zimmeck, Mads Schaarup Andersen, Pedro Giovanni Leon, Eduard Hovy and Norman Sadeh

Privacy policies written in natural language are the predominant method that operators of websites and online services use to communicate privacy practices to their users. However, these documents are infrequently read by Internet users, due in part to the length and complexity of the text. These factors also inhibit the efforts of regulators to assess privacy practices or to enforce standards. One proposed approach to improving the status quo is to use a combination of methods from crowdsourcing, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract details from privacy policies and present them in an understandable fashion. We sketch out this vision and describe our ongoing work to bring it to fruition. Further, we discuss challenges associated with bridging the gap between the contents of privacy policy text and website users’ abilities to understand those policies. These challenges are motivated by the rich interconnectedness of the problems as well as the broader impact of helping Internet users understand their privacy choices. They could also provide a basis for competitions that use the annotated corpus introduced in this paper.