Early Detection of Sexual Predators in Chats

Matthias Vogt, Ulf Leser, Alan Akbik


Abstract
An important risk that children face today is online grooming, where a so-called sexual predator establishes an emotional connection with a minor online with the objective of sexual abuse. Prior work has sought to automatically identify grooming chats, but only after an incidence has already happened in the context of legal prosecution. In this work, we instead investigate this problem from the point of view of prevention. We define and study the task of early sexual predator detection (eSPD) in chats, where the goal is to analyze a running chat from its beginning and predict grooming attempts as early and as accurately as possible. We survey existing datasets and their limitations regarding eSPD, and create a new dataset called PANC for more realistic evaluations. We present strong baselines built on BERT that also reach state-of-the-art results for conventional SPD. Finally, we consider coping with limited computational resources, as real-life applications require eSPD on mobile devices.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.386
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4985–4999
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.386
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.386
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthias Vogt, Ulf Leser, and Alan Akbik. 2021. Early Detection of Sexual Predators in Chats. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4985–4999, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Early Detection of Sexual Predators in Chats (Vogt et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.386.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.386.mp4
Code
 early-sexual-predator-detection/eSPD-lab
Data
PANC