Detection of child exploiting chats from a mixed chat dataset as a text classification task

Detection of child exploiting chats from a mixed chat dataset as a text classification task Md Waliur RahmanMiah School of Science, Information Technology and Engineering University of Ballarat walimiah@students.ballarat.edu.au John Yearwood School of Science, Information Technology and Engineering University of Ballarat j.yearwood@ballarat.edu.au Sid Kulkarni School of Science, Information Technology and Engineering University of Ballarat s.kulkarni@ballarat.edu.au Abstract Detection of child exploitation in Internet chatting is an important issue for the protec- tion of children from prospective online pae- dophiles. This paper investigates the effectiveness of text classifiers to identify Child Exploitation (CE) in chatting. As the chatting occurs among two or more users by typing texts, the text of chat-messages can be used as the data to be analysed by text classi- fiers. Therefore the problem of identification of CE chats can be framed as the problem of text classification by categorizing the chat- logs into predefined CE types. Along with three traditional text categorizing techniques a new approach has been made to accomplish the task. Psychometric and categorical infor- mation by LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) has been used and improvement of performance in some classifier has been found. For the experiments of current research the chat logs are collected from various web- sites open to public. Classification-via- Regression, J-48-Decision-Tree and Naïve- Bayes classifiers are used. Comparison of the performance of the classifiers is shown in the result. 1 Introduction The online chatting has become a popular tool for personal as well as group communication. It is cheap, convenient, virtual and private in nature. In an online chatting one can hide ones personal in- formation behind the monitor. This makes it a source of fun in one hand but possess threat on the other hand. The privacy and virtual nature of this medium increased the chance of some heinous acts which one may not commit in the real world. O’Connell (2003) informs that the Internet affords greater opportunity for adults with a sexual interest in children to gain access to children. Communica- tion between victim and predator can take place whilst both are in their respective real world homes but sharing a private virtual space. Young (2005) profiles this kind of virtual opportunist as ‘situ- ational sex offenders’ along with the ‘classical sex offenders’. Both these types of offenders are taking the advantages of the Internet to solicit and exploit children. This kind of solicitation or grooming by the use of an online medium for the purpose of exploiting a child may refer to the problem of ‘online child exploitation’. Currently there is no such system that can automatically identify the elements of child exploi- tation in chat text. It is very difficult for parents or the members of Law and Enforcement Agency (LEA) to watch over the children all the time to protect them from online paedophiles loitering over the vast space of the Internet. An online automatic CE detection system can be useful. Re- garding offline, most of the chatting programs have the options of storing the …

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