216 research outputs found

    BlogForever: D2.5 Weblog Spam Filtering Report and Associated Methodology

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    This report is written as a first attempt to define the BlogForever spam detection strategy. It comprises a survey of weblog spam technology and approaches to their detection. While the report was written to help identify possible approaches to spam detection as a component within the BlogForver software, the discussion has been extended to include observations related to the historical, social and practical value of spam, and proposals of other ways of dealing with spam within the repository without necessarily removing them. It contains a general overview of spam types, ready-made anti-spam APIs available for weblogs, possible methods that have been suggested for preventing the introduction of spam into a blog, and research related to spam focusing on those that appear in the weblog context, concluding in a proposal for a spam detection workflow that might form the basis for the spam detection component of the BlogForever software

    Advances in Social Media Research:Past, Present and Future

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    Social media comprises communication websites that facilitate relationship forming between users from diverse backgrounds, resulting in a rich social structure. User generated content encourages inquiry and decision-making. Given the relevance of social media to various stakeholders, it has received significant attention from researchers of various fields, including information systems. There exists no comprehensive review that integrates and synthesises the findings of literature on social media. This study discusses the findings of 132 papers (in selected IS journals) on social media and social networking published between 1997 and 2017. Most papers reviewed here examine the behavioural side of social media, investigate the aspect of reviews and recommendations, and study its integration for organizational purposes. Furthermore, many studies have investigated the viability of online communities/social media as a marketing medium, while others have explored various aspects of social media, including the risks associated with its use, the value that it creates, and the negative stigma attached to it within workplaces. The use of social media for information sharing during critical events as well as for seeking and/or rendering help has also been investigated in prior research. Other contexts include political and public administration, and the comparison between traditional and social media. Overall, our study identifies multiple emergent themes in the existing corpus, thereby furthering our understanding of advances in social media research. The integrated view of the extant literature that our study presents can help avoid duplication by future researchers, whilst offering fruitful lines of enquiry to help shape research for this emerging field

    Unsupervised Identification of Crime Problems from Police Free-text Data

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    We present a novel exploratory application of unsupervised machine-learning methods to identify clusters of specific crime problems from unstructured modus operandi free-text data within a single administrative crime classification. To illustrate our proposed approach, we analyse police recorded free-text narrative descriptions of residential burglaries occurring over a two-year period in a major metropolitan area of the UK. Results of our analyses demonstrate that topic modelling algorithms are capable of clustering substantively different burglary problems without prior knowledge of such groupings. Subsequently, we describe a prototype dashboard that allows replication of our analytical workflow and could be applied to support operational decision making in the identification of specific crime problems. This approach to grouping distinct types of offences within existing offence categories, we argue, has the potential to support crime analysts in proactively analysing large volumes of modus operandi free-text data—with the ultimate aims of developing a greater understanding of crime problems and supporting the design of tailored crime reduction interventions

    VISTA:an inclusive insider threat taxonomy, with mitigation strategies

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    Insiders have the potential to do a great deal of damage, given their legitimate access to organisational assets and the trust they enjoy. Organisations can only mitigate insider threats if they understand what the different kinds of insider threats are, and what tailored measures can be used to mitigate the threat posed by each of them. Here, we derive VISTA (inclusiVe InSider Threat tAxonomy) based on an extensive literature review and a survey with C-suite executives to ensure that the VISTA taxonomy is not only scientifically grounded, but also meets the needs of organisations and their executives. To this end, we map each VISTA category of insider threat to tailored mitigations that can be deployed to reduce the threat

    A study of topic and topic change in conversational threads

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    This thesis applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to the problem of topic and topic change in conversational threads using e-mail. We demonstrate that LDA can be used to successfully classify raw e-mail messages with threads to which they belong, and compare the results with those for processed threads, where quoted and reply text have been removed. Raw thread classification performs better, but processed threads show promise. We then present two new, unsupervised techniques for identifying topic change in e-mail. The first is a keyword clustering approach using LDA and DBSCAN to identify clusters of topics, and transition points between them. The second is a sliding window technique which assesses the current topic for every window, identifying transition points. The keyword clustering performs better than the sliding window approach. Both can be used as a baseline for future work.http://archive.org/details/astudyoftopicndt109454576NASA Ames Research Center author (civilian).Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

    State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

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    Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

    Artificial Intelligence as Evidence

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    This article explores issues that govern the admissibility of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) applications in civil and criminal cases, from the perspective of a federal trial judge and two computer scientists, one of whom also is an experienced attorney. It provides a detailed yet intelligible discussion of what AI is and how it works, a history of its development, and a description of the wide variety of functions that it is designed to accomplish, stressing that AI applications are ubiquitous, both in the private and public sectors. Applications today include: health care, education, employment-related decision-making, finance, law enforcement, and the legal profession. The article underscores the importance of determining the validity of an AI application (i.e., how accurately the AI measures, classifies, or predicts what it is designed to), as well as its reliability (i.e., the consistency with which the AI produces accurate results when applied to the same or substantially similar circumstances), in deciding whether it should be admitted into evidence in civil and criminal cases. The article further discusses factors that can affect the validity and reliability of AI evidence, including bias of various types, “function creep,” lack of transparency and explainability, and the sufficiency of the objective testing of AI applications before they are released for public use. The article next provides an in-depth discussion of the evidentiary principles that govern whether AI evidence should be admitted in court cases, a topic which, at present, is not the subject of comprehensive analysis in decisional law. The focus of this discussion is on providing a step-by-step analysis of the most important issues, and the factors that affect decisions on whether to admit AI evidence. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of practical suggestions intended to assist lawyers and judges as they are called upon to introduce, object to, or decide on whether to admit AI evidence

    The Democratization of News - Analysis and Behavior Modeling of Users in the Context of Online News Consumption

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    Die Erfindung des Internets ebnete den Weg fĂŒr die Demokratisierung von Information. Die Tatsache, dass Nachrichten fĂŒr die breite Öffentlichkeit zugĂ€nglicher wurden, barg wichtige politische Versprechen, wie zum Beispiel das Erreichen von zuvor uninformierten und daher oft inaktiven BĂŒrgern. Diese konnten sich nun dank des Internets tagesaktuell ĂŒber das politische Geschehen informieren und selbst politisch engagieren. WĂ€hrend viele Politiker und Journalisten ein Jahrzehnt lang mit dieser Entwicklung zufrieden waren, Ă€nderte sich die Situation mit dem Aufkommen der sozialen Online-Netzwerke (OSN). Diese OSNs sind heute nahezu allgegenwĂ€rtig – so beziehen inzwischen 67%67\% der Amerikaner zumindest einen Teil ihrer Nachrichten ĂŒber die sozialen Medien. Dieser Trend hat die Kosten fĂŒr die Veröffentlichung von Inhalten weiter gesenkt. Dies sah zunĂ€chst nach einer positiven Entwicklung aus, stellt inzwischen jedoch ein ernsthaftes Problem fĂŒr Demokratien dar. Anstatt dass eine schier unendliche Menge an leicht zugĂ€nglichen Informationen uns klĂŒger machen, wird die Menge an Inhalten zu einer Belastung. Eine ausgewogene Nachrichtenauswahl muss einer Flut an BeitrĂ€gen und Themen weichen, die durch das digitale soziale Umfeld des Nutzers gefiltert werden. Dies fördert die politische Polarisierung und ideologische Segregation. Mehr als die HĂ€lfte der OSN-Nutzer trauen zudem den Nachrichten, die sie lesen, nicht mehr (54%54\% machen sich Sorgen wegen Falschnachrichten). In dieses Bild passt, dass Studien berichten, dass Nutzer von OSNs dem Populismus extrem linker und rechter politischer Akteure stĂ€rker ausgesetzt sind, als Personen ohne Zugang zu sozialen Medien. Um die negativen Effekt dieser Entwicklung abzumildern, trĂ€gt meine Arbeit zum einen zum VerstĂ€ndnis des Problems bei und befasst sich mit Grundlagenforschung im Bereich der Verhaltensmodellierung. Abschließend beschĂ€ftigen wir uns mit der Gefahr der Beeinflussung der Internetnutzer durch soziale Bots und prĂ€sentieren eine auf Verhaltensmodellierung basierende Lösung. Zum besseren VerstĂ€ndnis des Nachrichtenkonsums deutschsprachiger Nutzer in OSNs, haben wir deren Verhalten auf Twitter analysiert und die Reaktionen auf kontroverse - teils verfassungsfeindliche - und nicht kontroverse Inhalte verglichen. ZusĂ€tzlich untersuchten wir die Existenz von Echokammern und Ă€hnlichen PhĂ€nomenen. Hinsichtlich des Nutzerverhaltens haben wir uns auf Netzwerke konzentriert, die ein komplexeres Nutzerverhalten zulassen. Wir entwickelten probabilistische Verhaltensmodellierungslösungen fĂŒr das Clustering und die Segmentierung von Zeitserien. Neben den BeitrĂ€gen zum VerstĂ€ndnis des Problems haben wir Lösungen zur Erkennung automatisierter Konten entwickelt. Diese Bots nehmen eine wichtige Rolle in der frĂŒhen Phase der Verbreitung von Fake News ein. Unser Expertenmodell - basierend auf aktuellen Deep-Learning-Lösungen - identifiziert, z. B., automatisierte Accounts anhand ihres Verhaltens. Meine Arbeit sensibilisiert fĂŒr diese negative Entwicklung und befasst sich mit der Grundlagenforschung im Bereich der Verhaltensmodellierung. Auch wird auf die Gefahr der Beeinflussung durch soziale Bots eingegangen und eine auf Verhaltensmodellierung basierende Lösung prĂ€sentiert

    Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

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    The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17
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