Investigation into the Application of Personality Insights and Language Tone Analysis in Spam Classification

Due to its persistence spam remains as one of the biggest problems facing users and suppliers of email communication services. Machine learning techniques have been very successful at preventing many spam mails from arriving in user mailboxes, however they still account for over 50% of all emails sent. Despite this relative success the economic cost of spam has been estimated as high as $50 billion in 2005 and more recently at$20 billion so spam can still be considered a considerable problem. In essence a spam email is a commercial communication trying to entice the receiver to take some positive action. This project uses the text from emails and creates personality insight and language tone scores through the use of IBM Watsons’ Tone Analyzer API. Those scores are used to investigate whether the language used in emails can be transformed into useful features that can be used to correctly classify them as spam or genuine emails. And during the course of this investigation a range of machine learning techniques are applied. Results from this experiment found that where just the personality insight and language tone features are used in the model some promising results with one dataset were shown. However over all datasets results were inconclusive with this model. Furthermore it was found that in a model where these features were used in combination with a normalised term-frequency feature-set no real improvement in the classification performance was shown

A discrete hidden Markov model for SMS spam detection

Many machine learning methods have been applied for short messaging service (SMS) spam detection, including traditional methods such as naive Bayes (NB), vector space model (VSM), and support vector machine (SVM), and novel methods such as long short-term memory (LSTM) and the convolutional neural network (CNN). These methods are based on the well-known bag of words (BoW) model, which assumes documents are unordered collection of words. This assumption overlooks an important piece of information, i.e., word order. Moreover, the term frequency, which counts the number of occurrences of each word in SMS, is unable to distinguish the importance of words, due to the length limitation of SMS. This paper proposes a new method based on the discrete hidden Markov model (HMM) to use the word order information and to solve the low term frequency issue in SMS spam detection. The popularly adopted SMS spam dataset from the UCI machine learning repository is used for performance analysis of the proposed HMM method. The overall performance is compatible with deep learning by employing CNN and LSTM models. A Chinese SMS spam dataset with 2000 messages is used for further performance evaluation. Experiments show that the proposed HMM method is not language-sensitive and can identify spam with high accuracy on both datasets

SMS Spam Filtering: Methods and Data

Mobile or SMS spam is a real and growing problem primarily due to the availability of very cheap bulk pre-pay SMS packages and the fact that SMS engenders higher response rates as it is a trusted and personal service. SMS spam filtering is a relatively new task which inherits many issues and solu- tions from email spam filtering. However it poses its own specific challenges. This paper motivates work on filtering SMS spam and reviews recent devel- opments in SMS spam filtering. The paper also discusses the issues with data collection and availability for furthering research in this area, analyses a large corpus of SMS spam, and provides some initial benchmark results

Hybrid GA-SVM for Efficient Feature Selection in E-mail Classification

Feature selection is a problem of global combinatorial optimization in machine learning in which subsets of relevant features are selected to realize robust learning models. The inclusion of irrelevant and redundant features in the dataset can result in poor predictions and high computational overhead. Thus, selecting relevant feature subsets can help reduce the computational cost of feature measurement, speed up learning process and improve model interpretability. SVM classifier has proven inefficient in its inability to produce accurate classification results in the face of large e-mail dataset while it also consumes a lot of computational resources. In this study, a Genetic Algorithm-Support Vector Machine (GA-SVM) feature selection technique is developed to optimize the SVM classification parameters, the prediction accuracy and computation time. Spam assassin dataset was used to validate the performance of the proposed system. The hybrid GA-SVM showed remarkable improvements over SVM in terms of classification accuracy and computation time. Keywords: E-mail Classification, Feature-Selection, Genetic algorithm, Support Vector Machin

Voting-based Classification for E-mail Spam Detection

The problem of spam e-mail has gained a tremendous amount of attention. Although entities tend to use e-mail spam filter applications to filter out received spam e-mails, marketing companies still tend to send unsolicited e-mails in bulk and users still receive a reasonable amount of spam e-mail despite those filtering applications. This work proposes a new method for classifying e-mails into spam and non-spam. First, several e-mail content features are extracted and then those features are used for classifying each e-mail individually. The classification results of three different classifiers (i.e. Decision Trees, Random Forests and k-Nearest Neighbor) are combined in various voting schemes (i.e. majority vote, average probability, product of probabilities, minimum probability and maximum probability) for making the final decision. To validate our method, two different spam e-mail collections were used

A systematic literature review on spam content detection and classification

The presence of spam content in social media is tremendously increasing, and therefore the detection of spam has become vital. The spam contents increase as people extensively use social media, i.e ., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and E-mail. The time spent by people using social media is overgrowing, especially in the time of the pandemic. Users get a lot of text messages through social media, and they cannot recognize the spam content in these messages. Spam messages contain malicious links, apps, fake accounts, fake news, reviews, rumors, etc. To improve social media security, the detection and control of spam text are essential. This paper presents a detailed survey on the latest developments in spam text detection and classification in social media. The various techniques involved in spam detection and classification involving Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and text-based approaches are discussed in this paper. We also present the challenges encountered in the identification of spam with its control mechanisms and datasets used in existing works involving spam detection

A deep learning method for automatic SMS spam classification: Performance of learning algorithms on indigenous dataset

SMS, one of the most popular and fast-growing GSM value-added services worldwide, has attracted unwanted SMS, also known as SMS spam. The effects of SMS spam are significant as it affects both the users and the service providers, causing a massive gap in trust among both parties. This article presents a deep learning model based on BiLSTM. Further, it compares our results with some of the states of the art machine learning (ML) algorithm on two datasets: our newly collected dataset and the popular UCI SMS dataset. This study aims to evaluate the performance of diverse learning models and compare the result of the new dataset expanded (ExAIS_SMS) using the following metrics the true positive (TP), false positive (FP), F-measure, recall, precision, and overall accuracy. The average accuracy for the BiLSTSM model achieved moderately improved results compared to some of the ML classifiers. The experimental results achieved significant improvement from the ground truth results after effective fine-tuning of some of the parameters. The BiLSTM model using the ExAIS_SMS dataset attained an accuracy of 93.4% and 98.6% for UCI datasets. Further comparison of the two datasets on the state-of-the-art ML classifiers gave an accuracy of Naive Bayes, BayesNet, SOM, decision tree, C4.5, J48 is 89.64%, 91.11%, 88.24%, 75.76%, 80.24%, and 79.2% respectively for ExAIS_SMS datasets. In conclusion, our proposed BiLSTM model showed significant improvement over traditional ML classifiers. To further validate the robustness of our model, we applied the UCI datasets, and our results showed optimal performance while classifying SMS spam messages based on some metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure.publishedVersio

Artificial intelligence in the cyber domain: Offense and defense

Artificial intelligence techniques have grown rapidly in recent years, and their applications in practice can be seen in many fields, ranging from facial recognition to image analysis. In the cybersecurity domain, AI-based techniques can provide better cyber defense tools and help adversaries improve methods of attack. However, malicious actors are aware of the new prospects too and will probably attempt to use them for nefarious purposes. This survey paper aims at providing an overview of how artificial intelligence can be used in the context of cybersecurity in both offense and defense.Web of Science123art. no. 41

Text Categorization Model Based on Linear Support Vector Machine

Spam mails constitute a lot of nuisances in our electronic mail boxes, as they occupy huge spaces which could rather be used for storing relevant data. They also slow down network connection speed and make communication over a network slow. Attackers have often employed spam mails as a means of sending phishing mails to their targets in order to perpetrate data breach attacks and other forms of cybercrimes. Researchers have developed models using machine learning algorithms and other techniques to filter spam mails from relevant mails, however, some algorithms and classifiers are weak, not robust, and lack visualization models which would make the results interpretable by even non-tech savvy people. In this work, Linear Support Vector Machine (LSVM) was used to develop a text categorization model for email texts based on two categories: Ham and Spam. The processes involved were dataset import, preprocessing (removal of stop words, vectorization), feature selection (weighing and selection), development of classification model (splitting data into train (80%) and test sets (20%), importing classifier, training classifier), evaluation of model, deployment of model and spam filtering application on a server (Heroku) using Flask framework. The Agile methodology was adopted for the system design; the Python programming language was implemented for model development. HTML and CSS was used for the development of the web application. The results from the system testing showed that the system had an overall accuracy of 98.56%, recall: 96.5%, F1-score: 97% and F-beta score of 96.23%. This study therefore could be beneficial to e-mail users, to data analysts, and to researchers in the field of NLP