On the Challenges of Creating Datasets for Analyzing Commercial Sex Advertisements to Assess Human Trafficking Risk and Organized Activity
It addresses the problem of dataset creation for researchers combating organized crime, but is incremental as it focuses on methodology rather than new detection technologies.
The study tackled the problem of building datasets for analyzing commercial sex advertisements to assess human trafficking risk and organized activity, developing a reproducible and automated methodology that analyzed five million advertisements and identified challenges in dataset creation.
Our study addresses the challenges of building datasets to understand the risks associated with organized activities and human trafficking through commercial sex advertisements. These challenges include data scarcity, rapid obsolescence, and privacy concerns. Traditional approaches, which are not automated and are difficult to reproduce, fall short in addressing these issues. We have developed a reproducible and automated methodology to analyze five million advertisements. In the process, we identified further challenges in dataset creation within this sensitive domain. This paper presents a streamlined methodology to assist researchers in constructing effective datasets for combating organized crime, allowing them to focus on advancing detection technologies.