Identifying Extremism in Social Media with Multi-view Context-Aware Subset Optimization

Cyber threat intelligence and security informatics play critical roles in the identification of the principal influencers and threats associated with criminal activity and extremism in web-based communities. This paper presents an effective, dynamic learning framework utilizing domain specific context information to design a novel classification model that can robustly identify malicious social media posts (e.g. enrollment propaganda for extremist groups) with expressions of extremism or criminal intent. Research towards automated identification of extreme online posts and their associated key suspects and threats faces numerous challenges, 1) Online data, particularly social media data, originated from numerous independent and heterogeneous sources are largely unstructured. 2) The tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of criminal activity and extremism are constantly evolving. 3) There are limited ground truth data to support the development of effective classification technologies. In this paper, we present a human-machine collaborative, semi-supervised learning system that can efficiently and effectively identify malicious social media posts in presence of these challenges. Our system and framework develops an initial classifier from limited annotated data and in an interactive manner evolves dynamically into a sophisticated model using shortlisted relevant samples, identified via a graph-based optimization method, solvable by maximum flow algorithm. This same method also may be used to refine the classifier as TTPs evolve. Under this framework, the classifier performance converges faster using roughly 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer annotated samples, as compared to fully supervised solutions, resulting in a reasonably acceptable accuracy of nearly 80%. We validate our framework using a large collection of English and non-English flagged words extracted from three web-based forums and manually verified by multiple independent annotators.