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Competition To Identify Sexual Predators In Chat Logs
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the University of Lugano, Switzerland, and other universities from the U.S. and Europe organize a competition to automatically identify sexual predators in chat logs. The task is described as: 'The goal of this sub-task is to identify classes of authors, namely online predators. You will be given chat logs involving two (or more) people and have to determine who is the one trying to convince the other participants(s) to provide some sexual favor. You will also need to identify the particular conversation where the person exploits his bad behavior.' Their data set covers hundreds of chat logs with dozens of true positives (i.e., chats where one is trying to hit on another)."
all those false positives
A/S/L
Set your phasers on "funky"!
automatically identify sexual predators in chat logs
OK sounds good hate those guys
trying to convince the other partecipants(s) to provide some sexual favor
Whoa whoa who here, thats me and my wife not a bunch of predators.
Whoever would have guessed that the govt trying to get into my bedroom would mean they're scanning my chat logs.
I suppose Target store wants to monetize this too...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Not everyone who solicits sexual favors is a "predator". They seem to be making that leap.
bloodninja: Baby, I been havin a tough night so treat me nice aight?
BritneySpears14: Aight.
bloodninja: Slip out of those pants baby, yeah.
BritneySpears14: I slip out of my pants, just for you, bloodninja.
bloodninja: Oh yeah, aight. Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat.
BritneySpears14: Oh, I like to play dress up.
bloodninja: Me too baby.
BritneySpears14: I kiss you softly on your chest.
bloodninja: I cast Lvl. 3 Eroticism. You turn into a real beautiful woman.
BritneySpears14: Hey...
bloodninja: I meditate to regain my mana, before casting Lvl. 8 Cock of the Infinite.
BritneySpears14: Funny I still don't see it.
bloodninja: I spend my mana reserves to cast Mighty F*ck of the Beyondness.
BritneySpears14: You are the worst cyber partner ever. This is ridiculous.
bloodninja: Don't f*ck with me bitch, I'm the mightiest sorcerer of the lands.
bloodninja: I steal yo soul and cast Lightning Lvl. 1,000,000 Your body explodes into a fine bloody mist, because you are only a Lvl. 2 Druid.
BritneySpears14: Don't ever message me again you piece of ****.
bloodninja: Robots are trying to drill my brain but my lightning shield inflicts DOA attack, leaving the robots as flaming piles of metal.
bloodninja: King Arthur congratulates me for destroying Dr. Robotnik's evil army of Robot Socialist Republics. The cold war ends. Reagan steals my accomplishments and makes like it was cause of him.
bloodninja: You still there baby? I think it's getting hard now.
bloodninja: Baby?
-------------------
bloodninja: Ok baby, we got to hurry, I don't know how long I can keep it ready for you.
j_gurli3: thats ok. ok i'm a japanese schoolgirl, what r u.
bloodninja: A Rhinocerus. Well, hung like one, thats for sure.
j_gurli3: haha, ok lets go.
j_gurli3: i put my hand through ur hair, and kiss u on the neck.
bloodninja: I stomp the ground, and snort, to alert you that you are in my breeding territory.
j_gurli3: haha, ok, u know that turns me on.
j_gurli3: i start unbuttoning ur shirt.
bloodninja: Rhinoceruses don't wear shirts.
j_gurli3: No, ur not really a Rhinocerus silly, it's just part of the game.
bloodninja: Rhinoceruses don't play games. They f*cking charge your ass.
j_gurli3: stop, cmon be serious.
bloodninja: It doesn't get any more serious than a Rhinocerus about to charge your ass.
bloodninja: I stomp my feet, the dust stirs around my tough skinned feet.
j_gurli3: thats it.
bloodninja: Nostrils flaring, I lower my head. My horn, like some phallic symbol of my potent virility, is the last thing you see as skulls collide and mine remains the victor. You are now a bloody red ragdoll suspended in the air on my mighty horn.
bloodninja: Goddam am I hard now.
--------------
BritneySpears14: Ok, are you ready?
eminemBNJA: Aight, yeah I'm ready.
BritneySpears14: I like your music Em... Tee hee.
eminemBNJA: huh huh, yeah, I make it for the ladies.
BritneySpears14: Mmm, we like it a lot. Let me show you.
BritneySpears14: I take off your pants, slowly, and massage your muscular physique.
eminemBNJA: Oh I like that Baby. I put on my robe and wizard hat.
BritneySpears14: What the f*ck, I told you not to message me again.
eminemBNJA: Oh ****
BritneySpears14: I swear if you do it one more time I'm gonna report your ISP and say you were sending me kiddie porn you f*ck up.
eminemBNJA: Oh ****
eminemBNJA: damn I gotta write down your names or something
Is this even difficult? Someone please tear into these weirdos.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
she was hitting on me? damnit.
...a competition to automatically identify sexual predators in chat logs.
They make Internet dating sound nasty.
I'm guessing we'll find out this is almost identical to the spam problem. Use a statistical approach, probably bayes filtering. Start with your ham and your spam and voila.
*BONG* *KLAXON* *BONG*
Here come the FBI. Off to Guantanamo with you.
detect_predator = (user_a.sex == "M" or user_b.sex == "M") and ((user_a.age=18) or (user_b.age>=18))
Boom! I win! Give me reward moneys.
if chat.username == Julian Assange;
return(sexual predator);
I can program electronic voting machines too!
Eventually, both the investigator and the investigatee will be investigators, and they will get caught up in whorls of self-righteousness and delusions of grandeur.
Too many idle hands and too much money waiting to be abused. Hooray!
I'd rather be going on long walks discussing different outlooks on life.
Go into chat room and say "I'm Chris Hansen" and see who leaves.
My work here is done.
I think many of us here could find such an algorithm useful to detect when a female is hitting on us.
What about an algorithm for detecting if one of the chatters is an adult who's posing as a 12-17 year-old for reasons of entrapment and TV ratings?
We MUST do this FOR THE CHILDREN. What could possibly go wrong?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What if I am just trying to get laid? Seriously, how does one determine from chat text whether a person is a 'sexual predator' vs. someone who is just looking for a casual hookup? Wouldn't the approach be similar if not identical? I smell a FAIL.
Of course, the results of this 'competition' will likely get support from conservative, big brother regimes as a way to ring up innocent and horny people - particularly targeting young men - online.
Gender based stereotyping, convictions and punishment coming soon to the interwebs and country you live in. That's just wonderful!
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
This looks like a not-too-well-prepared excercise as there is absolutely no definition of what they mean with "sexual predator," except that a sexual predator tries to gain some sort of a sexually-loaded response from the other side. The problem: what is considered a "sexually-loaded response," would e.g. a boyfriend asking his girlfriend for a bikini-picture qualify as a "predator" even though the act is perfectly common and acceptable, do they deem there is a possibility of a sexually-loaded conversation that still manages to say within the terms of "good behaviour" or are all sexually-loaded comments and conversations inherently "bad behaviour" etc. etc.
I have a feeling the whole point with this is to use the results for "protect the children" - politics in an effort to score brownie-points.
Do pattern matching on what the other chat room members reply with, rather than the pick up line itself.
Take off every 'sig' !!
So flirting makes someone a sexual predator now? They're just trying to develop moralistic spying and censorship technology.
The following are the people sponsoring this project:
general email: pan@webis.de
Patrick Juola: juola@mathcs.duq.edu
Shlomo Argamon: argamon@iit.edu
Efstathios Stamatatos: stamatatos@aegean.gr
Moshe Koppel: koppel@cs.biu.ac.il
Make sure you give them a piece of your mind...
Just invite some sexy aliens and let the fighting begin...
How will an impersonator be able to reliably mimic the real McCreep? The mindset is probably vastly different...
While cloaked in "won't somebody please think of the children" language, it appears to me that this project is really all about developing technology to rapidly scan a mountain of text conversations to identify any instances of behavior for which you have a few documented prototypes.
Swap in political activist, opposition party, occupy movement, flash mob, or hackers, and the project doesn't seem so appealing. The goal sounds like they would like to find an engine to which you could feed in a few examples and have a few thousand computers watching all conversations on the net.
Why would Universities participate in that? Are these people that naive? Why not spend the money on education materials, or web sites explaining the sexual predators techniques so at risk populations can be smarter, rather than helping governments build Skynet?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The competition should be about finding out who is NOT sexual predator.......
First, "being persistent" (common dating advice for men in earlier decades) became "stalking". Telling a woman she looked hot became "sexual harassment", even when the man had no power over the woman. Now, asking for sex makes you a "sexual predator". And if a woman agrees to sex, men have to worry that she may later claim she was raped.
The "sex is bad" side has won.
they call it a competition, but I can't see a prize...
Obviously the prize is the ****EPIC**** ****LULZ!!!1!1**** to be had.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A similar but more interesting contest would be to detect people trying to get political favors ;-) Oh wait - if someone non-government is chatting with someone that is government, they are probably after something...
I for one welcome our algorithmic, inflexible overlords.
"You will be given chat logs involving two (or more) people and have to determine who is the one trying to convince the other partecipants(s) to provide some sexual favor ."
That is called a date. And no, I'm not trying to be funny.
Look for a poster claiming to be a 12-yo girl. All the responses are sexual predators.
And of course, its always more palatable to couch surveillance projects in "Somebody Please think of the Children" language.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Since when is one person chatting with another and asking for "sexual favors" suddenly a sexual predator? If I'm hitting on a person and ask to see a naughty pic this is predatory behavior? If the person is of age and I'm of age WTF is the issue? If they asks me for a pic and I'm interested am I being preyed upon somehow? What if I welcome this, what's the issue? The assumptions here are tremendous IMO! Please tell me age plays SOME factor in all of this sheesh!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Apart from false positives, does this not crowsource privacy invasion. And does this not censor online chat
in a way noone wants to? Predators are individuals, so it's more usefull to introduce a score of some kind
for whatever links to specific indiduals..
Next you'll have crowd sourcing surveillance cameras and everyone will be a snitch with many false positives which justify a huge police force and big prisons full of forced laberous (like in the US where you have to earn your keep as a prisoner),,
Bad visions of the future if we start being dishonest and callous..
Hitting on someone in a chat room makes you a sexual predator?
Give me a fucking break, it's a far cry from stalking when you can be ignored by typing /ignore.
More of the old war on pleasure, the granddaddy of all moralistic wars!
You can submit clear and extensive evidence to the FBI that someone is proning online with a known minor and planning to go to their country where it was legal for them to have sex for the purposes of having sex with them (with names and flight days already included) and nothing happens. It's "not enough evidence". This would get even less attention. *posts as AC to protect self*
Any talk of black cats, brooms, our lord Satan, bedevilment, pagan rites of any kind (kabbalah witches like madonna) and *any* intellectual or legal chicanery are punishable by lowered employment prospects.
It's Alan Turing spinning in his grave.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
And of course, its always more palatable to couch surveillance projects in "Somebody Please think of the Children" language.
Note - don't use "couch" in a chat log that's likely to be scanned. Prefix it with 'casting', for example...
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
If Yawning means you might be a terrorist...... Perhaps if your last name starts with an "A" you might be a sexual predictor.... just ask Assange...
Well actually from the XML training data: the 'predators' these people identify seem to be adults preying on children. This is an important distinction because nowhere is this fact stated anywhere in the problem description. Also, searching for "college" in the training data shows that these chatrooms (or whatever they are) are not populated only by children.
I am in two minds over this project. On the one hand, these 'predators' seem to be real criminals who are committing real crimes. I don't consider cases involving law enforcement officers posing as fake children to be real crimes because the child wasn't real, but these seem to be real conversations.
On the other hand, the public likes a simple narrative which focuses on the psychological sickness of the predator. This makes it harder to deal with criminals who seem to be perfectly normal, have legitimate reasons for being in contact with children (e.g. are teachers), and whose actions (apart from their crimes) are also normal. Classifying people's psychological state takes the focus away from determining whether a criminal act has occurred. Mandatory reporting is an important step in this direction since it stops people from making the judgment of "should I subject a potentially innocent person to an investigation/court case", and lets the police/courts apply a consistent process. But as the Penn State case shows, this system is still not perfect.
I think that a fairer and more consistent approach would help dampen the hysteria that drives things like excessive surveillance. Society should try to prevent interactions between adults and children that are prima facie improper, but since entirely eliminating these interactions wouldn't stop all child abuse, preventing these interactions shouldn't be pursued with the kind of excessive rigor that causes people to ignore other issues such as excessive surveillance and overly broad laws.
Here's a challenge for the parser:
Fuck you!
Blow me!
Eat my ass!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
shoe on head
It would seem to me the use of the word participant would incite that both parties are receptive to the chat at hand, in which case depending on the nature the may actually be no predation going on. How does this differ from a chat bot?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
So, how do they determine that it's illegal?
I spent a great deal of time (in high school) talking to girls from my high school on AOL Instant Messenger back in the day. I bet 90% of that time was spent trying to get sexual favors. I'm sure I was often inappropriate, but I wasn't a pedophile (kinda hard when all parties are 16-18 years old).
Just another ignorant American.
Have you ever considered that there are people who communicate differently, in a nonstandard way? As someone who does, I guess that now opens me to a new set of slings and arrows. I guess it's not enough that I already get to be considered "weird" when trying to communicate face to face because 90% of my attention is focused on getting my own body language under control so it doesn't "say" the opposite of what I'm trying to say, now I gotta get my online communication under control as well. Even though mostly I don't give half a fuck whether the person I communicate with is 15 or 50.
If you don't want your kids to be prone to online predators, try talking some sense into them. It ain't my responsibility to keep them safe from harm, and I consider it highly unfair that you try to shift that burden onto me. Inform your kids that there's guys out there who want to meet them for the sole purpose to fuck them. But teh horrorz, you'd have to talk with them about s ... ss.... s... you know, the three letter word that ends with x! Nooooo, better not, let's childproof the internet instead. After all, sex is nothing a 16 year old should be interested in. Just like tits are not for little kids.
Effin' uptight wankers...
Fuck you. I'd say fuck your kids, too, but that would probably make me an online predator.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The very question is flawed. Just because someone is asking for a favor or trying to hit on someone does not make them a sexual predator.
SFC to SWAT: We got a perp, he is talking to pure innocent virgin geek boys and trying to seduce them as we speak.
SWAT TO SFC: Roger, we have him surrounded, how should we proceed, teargas?
SFC to SWAT: Negative, exterminate with extreme prejudice, shoot his balls off from the rooftop across the street, it is the only way to be sure.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The use and "casting couch" and "children" in the same post has been flagged by our perv-o-matic scanning algorithm. Please stay in your current location until your personal swat team arrives. Thank you for using US Internet Supply! Have a nice day :)
This is all subjective. If they haven't met in person or tried to meet in person then all you have is subjective interpretation of logs. I don't think logs can make someone a predator. I don't think people take what they say online as if they are saying it under oath or with a degree of seriousness. Sexual favors is also extremely vague of a concept. Anything could constitute a sexual favor so how exactly do we know what sexual favors are appropriate or inappropriate? I just think it's pointless to pour over logs for stuff like this unless you know based on some real evidence that the individual is a previous sex offender.
There is no such thing as e-rape. And a log cannot determine who is or isn't a pedophile.
What determines who is or isn't a pedophile is whether or not the person who generated the log is a sex offender. If they are a sex offender and they are caught talking to minors online it's entirely different because in their case they actually have a history of being a predator.
I think it's pointless and stupid to try to use logs alone to try and determine who will become a predator. I think that is impossible.
A log at best can represent a thought, but it doesn't represent an action. What people say and think is not the same as what people do. For instance we could probably find a log of just about anyone to make them appear racist, but that doesn't mean they actually are racist and I don't think we should go analyzing logs to try and see who is and isn't.
Actions are what determine how a person really is.
To expand on this a bit.... in a less creepy way.... I remember being an awkward 20 something geek. Never learned how to really "get girls", more than a bit socially inept. so naturally I started reading up on flirting, and dating.... etc...
After a while I came to a conclusion.... the distance between being friendly and hitting on someone is very very short and often as much in the mind of the individual as anywhere. In fact, most of the things that one is told to do "look her in the eye", "pay attention to what she is saying", "make physical contact from time to time"..... its all standard stuff that many people do in the course of normal conversation.
Even beyond my own issues, I recently witnessed an amusing exchange between a couple of friends of mine who started to talk seperately. One of them took their conversations as potentially expressing intertest, the other was agast at the idea, and couldn't believe the first had thought that.
Is it sometimes or often obvious? Sure, more so in text? maybe. However, I am skeptical that such a system will ever really work, when people have a hard enough time making these calls with full information in person.
It's just not possible to determine who is flirting with who and who is getting sexual favors from who when it's all just text.
We know there are signals, body language, words people like to use or whatever but no one knows them all. We know sexuality is sufficiently diverse that different topics might affect people sexually but not others. Basically it's just pointless to try to determine who a predator is via logs unless you just want to find the people who act like predators on the internet.
The problem is just talking like a predator on the internet doesn't mean they are a predator IRL. In the example of perverted justice those individuals had to actually try to meet the underage person to be considered a predator. In these instances you have some evidence of intent or action beyond just talking and thinking about it. But if we are going to say "well this person said these obscene words to this other person... so they are a sex predator" is just ridiculous. Obscenity and lewd conduct is not the same as being a predator.
Anyone can have too much to drink one day and be obscene or lewd or inappropriate, but to be a sex predator someone has to actually be serious about what they are doing. You cannot tell the seriousness of a situation from logs alone. You can only figure out that this adult was having nasty thoughts about some minor.
This looks like a not-too-well-prepared excercise as there is absolutely no definition of what they mean with "sexual predator," except that a sexual predator tries to gain some sort of a sexually-loaded response from the other side. The problem: what is considered a "sexually-loaded response," would e.g. a boyfriend asking his girlfriend for a bikini-picture qualify as a "predator" even though the act is perfectly common and acceptable, do they deem there is a possibility of a sexually-loaded conversation that still manages to say within the terms of "good behaviour" or are all sexually-loaded comments and conversations inherently "bad behaviour" etc. etc.
I have a feeling the whole point with this is to use the results for "protect the children" - politics in an effort to score brownie-points.
This is more a sort of thought profiling, or sexual thought profiling. It doesn't actually catch predators, it just catches people who communicate like predators. People can learn to communicate in a more civilized manner but lewd or obscene communication is not the same as child molestation, rape, etc. Also it's impossible to determine which words are sexual and which aren't.
How do we know how Jane and Joe are interpreting each other? Are we going to go into their minds and try to judge their thoughts? The whole idea of that is ridiculous. Someone could send you a URL and that could be considered obscene and now you've electronically raped them with a URL? You use a poor choice of words and that is obscene and now you're a predator?
I figured out the algorithm. EVERYONE!
Thank you, now where is my money?
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
For raving hate speech? Oh wait, I don't need a mechanism for that. It's called "reading".
Kid's, this is some adult talk. please leave the thread.
The internet is about sex . Theres pr0n sites,live cam chat, usenet(r.i.p.), sexting, and people looking to get laid. Predators sounds like a bloodbath. ,cum all, come on.
For instance, right now I'm sitting here all buff on my exercise-ball with a woody rising over my six-pack. Anyone wanting to manipulate my apparatus should describe how below.
Go ahead free yourselves, we fuck, we are not predators. Did you expect to get laid without contact or communication? Pred-a-fucking-what? Is this some impotent professors idea of a joke? sexual predators? Call a pedo a pedo and feed him to the lions, but people aggressively chasing bumper on the net is a fact of life. Get over it or get AOL or something. What, you afraid I'm gonna cuck you with your wife? Mom? Probably hit your sister, might hit you if you relax a little.
Let's all get naked here and get some action. Geeks need sex. RIGHT NOW! Come on, come out and say it. You want to fuck. Someone, Anyone, Come one
SWM seeks DFDF 420 friendly perversion with singles couples familys, no animals, enema or hard violence. Negotiate conjoined twins, midgets to front of line.
Slashdot,News for Nerds, Sex Matters
And of course, its always more palatable to couch surveillance projects in "Somebody Please think of the Children" language.
Yeah, fucking child protection laws. Just let the kids express their freedom to make mistakes, anything else is just socialism.
The following are two different things:
1. Consensual sex between adults
2. Stalking and raping children
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"Hitting on" someone and looking for "sexual favors" makes one a sexual predator nowadays?
Liberty in your lifetime
flag them all, then strip search them all. now legal!
actually you're looking to identify pre-daters.