Natural Language Processing for Internet Security: the AMiCA project

The AMiCA project is a project sponsored by the Flemish government that targets monitoring and maintaining the internet security of children and young people. In this project, research teams from the Universities of Antwerp, Ghent and Leuven cooperate in the development of multimodal detection of threatening situations in social networks by means of text and image analysis. We focus on three critical situations: cyberbullying, sexually transgressive behaviour, and depression and suicidal behaviour.

In this paper, we introduce the Natural Language Processing issues encountered in the text analysis part of the project. More specifically, we focus on social media language normalisation, frame-based detection of temporal and other aspects of the critical situations, adaptation of computational stylometry techniques to the goals of the project, and deep text analysis to provide useful features for detection.