An intelligent categorization engine for bilingual web content filtering

Abstract

It is important to protect children and unsuspecting adults from the harmful effects of objectionable materials, such as pornography, violence, and hate messages, which are now prevalent on the World-Wide Web. This calls for effective tools for web content analysis and filtering of objectionable contents. Our study of existing web content filtering systems has identified a number of deficiencies in these systems. Using the analysis of pornographic web pages as a case study, we present an intelligent bilingual web page categorization engine that can determine if an English or Chinese language web page contains pornographic materials. We have implemented the categorization engine to perform offline web page analysis and near-instantaneous online filtering. Performance evaluation of our system has verified its effectiveness.