Title
Applying question answering technology to locating malevolent online content
Date Issued
01 August 2007
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Arizona State University
Abstract
We have empirically compared two classes of technologies capable of locating potentially malevolent online content: 1) popular keyword searching, currently widely used by law enforcement and general public, and 2) emerging question answering (QA). The Google search engine exemplified the first approach. To exemplify the second, we further advanced the pattern based probabilistic QA approach and implemented a proof-of-concept prototype that was capable of finding web pages that provide the answers to the given questions, including non-factual ones (e.g. "How to build a pipe bomb?"). The answers to those question typically indicate the presence of malevolent content. Our findings suggest that QA technology can be a good addition to the traditional keyword searching for the task of locating malevolent online content and, possibly, for a more general task of interactive online information exploration. © 2006.
Start page
1404
End page
1418
Volume
43
Issue
4
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Psicología Ingeniería de sistemas y comunicaciones
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-34547673132
Source
Decision Support Systems
ISSN of the container
01679236
Sponsor(s)
For this reasons, malevolent content becomes subject to monitoring by law-enforcement, public watchdogs and researchers. For example, The Dark Web Portal project at the University of Arizona [6,22] , supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), helps researchers locate, collect, and analyze the alternate side of the Web which is used by terrorist and extremist groups. The project studies various methods of locating the malevolent online content. The researchers reported that the activities to locate these dangerous contents need substantial manual work in identifying seed pages (starting points), finding the query terms and filtering irrelevant results. Thus, there is a growing need for more powerful tools to locate potentially malevolent content, which is the focus of our paper. Although we limited the scope of our study to the content that facilitates cyber crime, since the techniques that we studied are not domain specific we believe that our results can be generalized to virtually any type of malevolent content.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus