Online paedophile activity in social media has become a major concern in society as Internet access is easily available to a broader younger population. One common form of online child exploitation is child grooming, where adults and minors exchange sexual text and media via social media platforms. Such behaviour involves a number of stages performed by a predator (adult) with the final goal of approaching a victim (minor) in person. This paper presents a study of such online grooming stages from a machine learning perspective. We propose to characterise such stages by a series of features covering sentiment polarity, content, and psycho-linguistic and discourse patterns. Our experiments with online chatroom conversations show good results in automatically classifying chatlines into various grooming stages. Such a deeper understanding and tracking of predatory behaviour is vital for building robust systems for detecting grooming conversations and potential predators on social media
