Page 123 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2020

A TECHNIQUE FOR EXTRACTING THE INTENTION OF MESSENGERS IN SOCIAL
MEDIA

1
Mohamed Fazil Mohamed Firdhous ; Balakrishnan Nalin Prashanth 2
1 Depertment of Information Technology, University of Moratuwa, Moratuwa 10400, Sri Lanka
2 Faculty of Information Technology, University of Moratuwa, Moratuwa 10400, Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT Therefore, it is very important to analyze the chat messages
to understand the intention of the parties involved in chatting
Today social media has become an integral part of human to protect young users from getting caught up in probable
life. Though there are many advantages social media has fraudulent activities. Several researchers have proposed
some shortcomings, especially when it comes to young users. techniques for understating the topic of IM discussions in the
Parents generally do not want their young children to have past. Unlike topic detection in other text based
social media accounts. Even if some parents allow their communications, topic detection in IM is difficult due to
young children to have their own accounts, they want them many reasons including unique features included in chat
to use it under their active supervision. This is mainly due to messages, short length of messages, non-standard
the reason that parents fear that children may be exposed to abbreviations used and different meaning bearing
inappropriate content, or may become victims of abuse by components in messages such as emojis, smileys, emoticons
cyber-criminals. In this paper, the authors propose a and hyperlinks. Hence, it is important to understand these
technique that can extract the intention of users of online different characteristics and components of instant messages
chatting by converting the non-text information along with to process them effectively.
misspelled and abbreviated text into meaningful text and
analyzing it to understand the true motive of the messenger. In this paper, the authors propose a technique that can be used
The tests conducted on the technique show that it performs to decipher the motive of messengers by interpreting all the
better than a cosine similarity test within the domain of different components contained in a message. As a first step
online chatting. The other main advantage of this technique towards achieving this objective, the study was focused on
is that it can be integrated with any social media platform understanding the characteristics of chat messages in online
with relative ease making it secure even for young children. social media. Then the authors propose a semantics-based
technique to identify the intention of the parties involved in
Keywords – child safe, intention identification, secure messaging by grouping the related messages to increase the
messaging, social media messaging length of the text and to make them semantically richer. The
scope of the study was limited to English chat messages in
1. INTRODUCTION Facebook for practical reasons. Several preprocessing
techniques were employed to extract the meaning of non-text
At present with the development of technology, instant components in messages along with a novel method of
messaging (IM) has become one of the vital forms of disambiguating nouns, verbs and adjectives used in messages.
communication. People of all age groups use IM to The paper also presents a novel algorithm to group related
communicate with and to keep in touch with their messages in a conversation. Finally, the proposed algorithm
acquaintances. Hence, almost all the online social media was tested for its effectiveness by comparing the results with
platforms support the IM feature. Though IM helps people that of cosine similarity.
immensely to keep in touch compared to traditional
communication technologies, they have certain shortcomings The rest of the paper is organized as follows; Section 2
as well [1]. One of the major shortcomings of IM in social discusses related work where similar techniques proposed in
media is the anonymity of the involved parties. This the literature were critically analyzed with respect to their
anonymity enables the users of IM with malicious intent to
use it for fraudulent purposes. Children are especially advantages and disadvantages. Section 3presents a detailed
vulnerable and have the greater chance of falling into trouble, discussion on the characteristics of chat messages
as they are unable to understand the real motive of the other emphasizing the importance of handling them differently
party. Some of the ways people with malicious intent abuse when compared to normal text. Section 4 describes the
IM include using it for the solicitation of sex from innocent technique developed in this research and how it is used to
users, promoting violence/terrorism, theft of sensitive implement the solution for the problem addressed
information, and bullying [2]. Hence, it is very important to highlighting the novelty of the technique. Section 5reports the
protect children from these kinds of predators trying to abuse experiments carried out to test the performance and
the technology to satisfy their reprehensible desires. effectiveness of the proposed technique together with a
detailed discussion on the results. Finally, Section 6concludes

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