Textual Analysis for the Protection of Children and Teenagers in Social Media - Classification of Inappropriate Messages for Children and Teenagers

Nowadays the Internet is widely used by children and teenagers, where privacy and exposure protection are often not prioritised. This can leave them exposed to paedophiles, who can use a simple chat to start a conversation, which may be the first step towards sexual abuse. In the paper (Falcão Jr. et al, 2016), the authors proposed a tool to detect possible dangerous conversations for a minor in a social network, based on the minor's behaviour. However, the proposed tool does not thoroughly address the analyses of the messages exchanged and attempts to detect the suspicious ones in a chat conversation using a superficial approach. This project aims to extend (Falcão Jr. et al, 2016) by automatically classifying the messages exchanged between a minor and an adult in a social network, hence to separate the ones that seem to come from a paedophile from those that seem to be a normal conversation. An experiment with a real conversation was done to test the effectiveness of the created model.