Detecting Radical Text over Online Media using Deep Learning
This work addresses the threat of extremist content on social media for security agencies, but it is incremental as it applies a known deep learning method to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting radical text in online media by using an LSTM-based deep learning approach, achieving a precision of 85.9% on a dataset of 61,601 annotated records.
Social Media has influenced the way people socially connect, interact and opinionize. The growth in technology has enhanced communication and dissemination of information. Unfortunately,many terror groups like jihadist communities have started consolidating a virtual community online for various purposes such as recruitment, online donations, targeting youth online and spread of extremist ideologies. Everyday a large number of articles, tweets, posts, posters, blogs, comments, views and news are posted online without a check which in turn imposes a threat to the security of any nation. However, different agencies are working on getting down this radical content from various online social media platforms. The aim of our paper is to utilise deep learning algorithm in detection of radicalization contrary to the existing works based on machine learning algorithms. An LSTM based feed forward neural network is employed to detect radical content. We collected total 61601 records from various online sources constituting news, articles and blogs. These records are annotated by domain experts into three categories: Radical(R), Non-Radical (NR) and Irrelevant(I) which are further applied to LSTM based network to classify radical content. A precision of 85.9% has been achieved with the proposed approach