Detecting Cybercrimes in Accordance with Pakistani Law: Dataset and Evaluation Using PLMs

Faizad Ullah, Ali Faheem, Ubaid Azam, Muhammad Sohaib Ayub, Faisal Kamiran, Asim Karim


Abstract
Cybercrime is a serious and growing threat affecting millions of people worldwide. Detecting cybercrimes from text messages is challenging, as it requires understanding the linguistic and cultural nuances of different languages and regions. Roman Urdu is a widely used language in Pakistan and other South Asian countries, however, it lacks sufficient resources and tools for natural language processing and cybercrime detection. To address this problem, we make three main contributions in this paper. (1) We create and release CRU, a benchmark dataset for text-based cybercrime detection in Roman Urdu, which covers a number of cybercrimes as defined by the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) of Pakistan. This dataset is annotated by experts following a standardized procedure based on Pakistan’s legal framework. (2) We perform experiments on four pre-trained language models (PLMs) for cybercrime text classification in Roman Urdu. Our results show that xlm-roberta-base is the best model for this task, achieving the highest performance on all metrics. (3) We explore the utility of prompt engineering techniques, namely prefix and cloze prompts, for enhancing the performance of PLMs for low-resource languages such as Roman Urdu. We analyze the impact of different prompt shapes and k-shot settings on the performance of xlm-roberta-base and bert-base-multilingual-cased. We find that prefix prompts are more effective than cloze prompts for Roman Urdu classification tasks, as they provide more contextually relevant completions for the models. Our work provides useful insights and resources for future research on cybercrime detection and text classification in low-resource languages.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.422
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
4717–4728
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.422
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Faizad Ullah, Ali Faheem, Ubaid Azam, Muhammad Sohaib Ayub, Faisal Kamiran, and Asim Karim. 2024. Detecting Cybercrimes in Accordance with Pakistani Law: Dataset and Evaluation Using PLMs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4717–4728, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Cybercrimes in Accordance with Pakistani Law: Dataset and Evaluation Using PLMs (Ullah et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.422.pdf