Investigating the Application of Common-Sense Knowledge-Base for Identifying Term Obfuscation in Adversarial Communication
This addresses security challenges for intelligence agencies by detecting concealed messages from terrorists or criminals, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing word substitution methods.
The paper tackled the problem of identifying word obfuscation in adversarial communication by using ConceptNet to compute conceptual similarity and define a MACS metric, achieving effectiveness in experiments on datasets like Enron emails and Brown corpus.
Word obfuscation or substitution means replacing one word with another word in a sentence to conceal the textual content or communication. Word obfuscation is used in adversarial communication by terrorist or criminals for conveying their messages without getting red-flagged by security and intelligence agencies intercepting or scanning messages (such as emails and telephone conversations). ConceptNet is a freely available semantic network represented as a directed graph consisting of nodes as concepts and edges as assertions of common sense about these concepts. We present a solution approach exploiting vast amount of semantic knowledge in ConceptNet for addressing the technically challenging problem of word substitution in adversarial communication. We frame the given problem as a textual reasoning and context inference task and utilize ConceptNet's natural-language-processing tool-kit for determining word substitution. We use ConceptNet to compute the conceptual similarity between any two given terms and define a Mean Average Conceptual Similarity (MACS) metric to identify out-of-context terms. The test-bed to evaluate our proposed approach consists of Enron email dataset (having over 600000 emails generated by 158 employees of Enron Corporation) and Brown corpus (totaling about a million words drawn from a wide variety of sources). We implement word substitution techniques used by previous researches to generate a test dataset. We conduct a series of experiments consisting of word substitution methods used in the past to evaluate our approach. Experimental results reveal that the proposed approach is effective.