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Extracting Social Structure from DarkWeb Forums

Phillips, Elizabeth, Nurse, Jason R. C., Goldsmith, Michael, Creese, Sadie (2015) Extracting Social Structure from DarkWeb Forums. In: 5th International Conference on Social Media Technologies‚ Communication‚ and Informatics (SOTICS '15). (Access to this publication is currently restricted. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:67504)

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Abstract

This paper explores various Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques in order to identify a range of potentially ‘important’ members of Islamic Networks within Dark Web Forums. For this experiment, we conducted our investigation on five forums collected in previous work as part of the DarkWeb Forum portal and built upon the tool support created in our previous research in order to visualise and analyse the network. Whilst existing work attempts to identify these structures through state-of-the-art Computational Linguistic techniques, our work relies on the communication metadata alone. Our analysis involved first calculating a range of SNA metrics to better understand the group members, and then apply unsupervised learning in order to create clusters that would help classify the Dark Web Forums users into hierarchical clusters. In order to create our social networks, we investigated the effect of repeated author resolution and various weighting schemes on the ranking of forum members by creating four social networks per forum and evaluating the correlation of the top n users (for n = 10; 20; 30; 40; 50 and 100). Our results identified that varying the weighting schemes created more consistent ranking schemes than varying the repeated author resolution.

Item Type: Conference or workshop item (Paper)
Subjects: Q Science
T Technology
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Jason Nurse
Date Deposited: 02 Jul 2018 17:08 UTC
Last Modified: 17 Aug 2022 11:02 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/67504 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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