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Deep Neural Networks for Bot Detection (arxiv.org)
1 point by kensoh on Feb 19, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Rather than judging accounts from posts and network clues, this system reads one tweet's text plus account details to spot bots, trained on a small labeled set padded with made-up bot examples. From one tweet it hit over 96% accuracy, beating earlier best methods.

Abstract

The problem of detecting bots, automated social media accounts governed by software but disguising as human users, has strong implications. For example, bots have been used to sway political elections by distorting online discourse, to manipulate the stock market, or to push anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that caused health epidemics. Most techniques proposed to date detect bots at the account level, by processing large amount of social media posts, and leveraging information from network structure, temporal dynamics, sentiment analysis, etc. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network based on contextual long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture that exploits both content and metadata to detect bots at the tweet level: contextual features are extracted from user metadata and fed as auxiliary input to LSTM deep nets processing the tweet text. Another contribution that we make is proposing a technique based on synthetic minority oversampling to generate a large labeled dataset, suitable for deep nets training, from a minimal amount of labeled data (roughly 3,000 examples of sophisticated Twitter bots). We demonstrate that, from just one single tweet, our architecture can achieve high classification accuracy (AUC > 96%) in separating bots from humans. We apply the same architecture to account-level bot detection, achieving nearly perfect classification accuracy (AUC > 99%). Our system outperforms previous state of the art while leveraging a small and interpretable set of features yet requiring minimal training data.

Sneha Kudugunta, Emilio Ferrara
arXiv:1802.04289 · cs.AI, cs.SI · submitted Feb 12, 2018 · updated Feb 18, 2018
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