Abstract
Criminals use online social networks for various activities by including communication, planning, and execution of criminal acts. They often employ ciphered posts using slang expressions, which are restricted to specific groups. Although literature shows advances in analysis of posts in natural language messages, such as hate discourses, threats, and more notably in the sentiment analysis; research enabling intention analysis of posts using slang expressions is still underexplored. We propose a framework and construct software prototypes for the selection of social network posts with criminal slang expressions and automatic classification of these posts according to illocutionary classes. The developed framework explores computational ontologies and machine learning (ML) techniques. Our defined Ontology of Criminal Expressions represents crime concepts in a formal and flexible model, and associates them with criminal slang expressions. This ontology is used for selecting suspicious posts and decipher them. In our solution, the criminal intention in written posts is automatically classified relying on learned models from existing posts. This work carries out a case study to evaluate the framework with 8,835,290 tweets. The obtained results show its viability by demonstrating the benefits in deciphering posts and the effectiveness of detecting user’s intention in written criminal posts based on ML.
Highlights
The Web and social network services play a central role to bring individuals with common interests closer
Intention expression must be considered in these tools for supporting investigators to select and analyze suspicious social network posts because intention refers to an important element of human communication
We employed a multiple-strategy approach to deal with the automatic selection and classification of written posts from online social networks
Summary
The Web and social network services play a central role to bring individuals with common interests closer. Such close interaction enables the occurrence of illicit events. Web content and its communication capabilities provide advantages for planning and executing criminal acts [1]. The Web can benefit the development of software tools and mechanisms to support the investigation and the prevention of criminal acts. Several countries, such as Brazil, have seen a fast increase in crime rates in the last few decades [2]
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