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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)."
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
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.
I think they could mine bash.org for a sampling to base their algorithm on. Unfortunately they'd have to wade through discussions of horse porn and tabletop role playing game issues before they could establish a firm model to follow...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You think?
http://futurelawyer.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8345170df69e20120a5cbcb64970c-popup
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?
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.
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.
I put on my robe and wizard hat...
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.
You mean freedom positives!
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
It isn't always obvious because efforts to get into someone's head aren't always obvious.
Some people will attempt to groom a chat participant - they will ask more or less innocuous questions, but occasionally throw in one that is just a shade less innocuous than the others. Over time they will push the limits, until eventually some of the most outrageous stuff seems like it's just par for the course from this person. They'll couch all of this in the guise of being a mentor or friend, will back off if their target gets a little iffy, but will try to reconcile and take another tack. When this method is used against a target from a vulnerable population (kids, for example) it's scary how effective it can be and how easily even people who are not in vulnerable groups get taken in (see: people who fall for scams).
Eventually predators will shift to a more active part once their target has been willing to talk openly about previously forbidden subjects, and they'll attempt to get a cam session, phonecall, pics, meetings, whatever. The target might agree to go on cam or to pics, and at that point the predator has them - "Hey, if you don't keep doing this I'll post those pics/videos everywhere" etc.
It's easy to recognize the obvious and unsubtle ones, but it's a lot harder to recognize (from a relatively small sample) the more crafty ones unless you're an outside observer. For example, if I were someone being groomed by a predator as I described, I might not balk at a question as to whether I had pubic hair since I'd already been conditioned to trust that person. But if I were an outside observer it would be obvious that is untoward - unfortunately for many people targeted by predators, no outside observer is there to kind of make them realize what's going on.
As a researcher who often works with young people who have been exploited or put at risk, I've been given chatlogs from predators like the ones I've described above and was just astonished at how things progressed. However, quite a few of the skeevy questions that were asked by predators were ALSO asked in completely innocuous relationships and in that context were not nearly as skeevy. Just flagging based on questions or terms isn't enough - it's a context that needs to be understood.
The goal, I imagine, in the case of this contest, would be to help automate the process of that "outside observer" to have the software check for suspicious behavior/history and throw a flag once it passes a certain threshold but BEFORE the target gets exploited, and possibly to minimize the number of false positives so that extensive resources aren't wasted on non-predatory relationships.
Ethical considerations aside, it's an interesting problem and could be applied to a number of areas where you're attempting to detect non-obvious manipulative behavior in any kind of multi-party interaction.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
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.
and tabletop role playing game issues
I put on my robe and wizard hat...
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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
Agreed, I'd feel a lot better if part of this competition was zero (not "acceptably low") false positives. Some backwards places in the world (yes, I am speaking specifically of America) being accused of sex crimes is a Bad Thing and will ruin your entire life, even if the accusation is baseless. It is not acceptable to create an algorithm that will ruin innocent people's lives with some probability, if used for its intended purpose.
It's Alan Turing spinning in his grave.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Thanks to the incomprehensible network of laws, chances are the victims of a false positive are already guilty of something else, so they deserve it.
And I guess America deserves it for continuing to vote Republocrat.
False positives are likely to be acceptable as they will be mining masses of date for juicy bits to pass onto human operators who spend all day reading through terrible filth and slowly going insane (I had a similar job to this). Missing key details is far more worrying than passing a bit of extra work onto the human operators.
When one party is thinking about the interaction in a different context than the other there is HUGE room for misunderstanding even when the signals are unambiguous.
Then it would appear that what you call unambiguous signals are in fact extremely ambiguous. The context is part of the message too, so if the parties are not aware of what context the other is using, then the communication has already failed.
Some people are very, very good at reading people - can take one look at someone, see a relatively small number of factors but put them together into a framework that suggests lots of other probabilities about the person that turns out to be startlingly accurate. I could see them trying this to see if it's possible for algorithms to pull off this same kind of feat.
It's called cold reading, and it's a parlor trick / con game / pseudoscience. The reason it appears to work is primarily due to confirmation bias - you want to believe, so you focus on the successes and ignore the misses, even when the latter far outnumber the former.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
As an awkward 20-something myself, I have found it extremely important to verifying or explicitly establish context during important communications. For example, if after a sufficient amount of normal conversation you are not certain that she is uninterested, say out loud "I am interested in you as a possible romantic partner." It is much more effective than the mix of body language and innocuous comments known as flirting, especially when the target is similarly awkward and socially unaware. If she is normal instead, she'll either find your candor endearing or you would not have got along anyways. Basically my problem is that I am just as bad at interpreting my own body language as that of others, so even if the other party has received the message I cannot be sure that I transmitted it correctly without saying it out loud.
See, the great thing about experiments/projects like this is that they can help us understand if our gut instinct about whether or not something can work or not is actually correct.
As I said, I also am skeptical about how well this could possibly work, but it's definitely think its an interesting problem to look at be ause if it IS possible, despite our mutual skepticism, that's pretty damn neat and can lead to learning more things.
Some of the most interesting bits of knowledge we have came about by asking "pointless" questions and doing "pointless" experiments that people said couldn't work.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Think of the children, man. Just because a few people are jailed that were hitting on other people who were legal doesn't mean this system doesn't work. Besides, what would you rather have? A few people you don't know and will likely never interact with thrown in jail? Or the risk that maybe possibly someday your kid could be talked dirty to online?
That's how people think. Sorry to sound like an ass.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
There will always be false positives. This is why there is a procedure to follow that ends with setting a meeting with someone who thinks they are going to hook up with an underage person for sex.
It's tough for a 35 year old male to claim innocents when they knowing go someplace to have sex with a 12 yer old..or so they thought.
Yes, like all things it needs to be monitored and regulated.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What, exactly, is wrong with trying to get sexual favours and how does that make one a "predator"?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Well that's simple. Decrease the number of false positives by asking in their profiles "Do you have a moustache?" That'd take it to 100%.
I'm pretty much in agreement. There's a difference between being a sexual predator and just someone trying to get laid.
I have met and boned several women that I met online. Some were dating/serious relationships that started out via an online encounter, some were straight booty calls that started out as an online meeting. If I'm 25 and she's 22 and we both know what's what, nobody involved is a sexual predator. Although without knowing the details of who we are, it might look that way to an observer.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
FTFY!!!
# grep -i 'wanna fuck?' *.log