ChatCoder

Supporting the fight to protect families against cyber crime.

About Us

With an increase in social media comes an increase in cyber-violence involving younger users. This includes cyber-predation and cyber-bullying. The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently funded a grant "Tracking Predators and Bullies Via Chat Log Transcripts" to support research into providing solutions for protecting children. This website is designed to both provide technical support and data for the project, as well as keep interested readers informed about our progress.


Project Description


Cyber-violence is increasing exponentially as social networking applications such as Instant Messaging, Facebook, and MySpace are developed, deployed, and reach increasingly younger users. These young users frequently fall victim to cyber-predators and cyber-bullies. The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently funded a grant "Tracking Predators and Bullies Via Chat Log Transcripts" to support research into providing solutions for protecting children. Advances in both communicative theory and information retrieval technologies are required to accomplish the goals of this project. This website is designed to both provide technical support and data for the project, as well as keep interested readers informed about our progress.

Our preliminary work studied chat logs between convicted predators and adults posing as youth (pseudo-victims). We have developed a communicative theory of Internet predation based on a close communicative study of the dialog used by the predator, as well as a prototype software application, ChatCoder, that is used to assist in the analysis of chat transcripts and development of the codebook which is an essential piece of the communicative theory. This software continues to be updated and enhanced as the project progresses to ensure that the MCS researchers are able to perform their analysis in the most efficient manner.

In addition to developing a software program that protects children from cyber-predators and cyber-bullies, our project gives us the opportunity to make predator and bully chat data available to other researchers. Currently, there is very little labeled data available for this type of research; therefore, one of our most important tasks is the compilation of a set of labeled data that we will make available to the communications and information retrieval research communities.

Our Publications

2020

  • Edwards, A., Edwards, L., and Martin, A. (2020, July). Cyberbullying Perceptions and Experiences in Diverse Youth. In International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (pp. 9-16). Springer, Cham.

  • Demoll, D., Edwards, A., and Lynne Edwards. (2020). Detecting Cyberbullying Activity Across Platforms. In S. Latifi (eds.), 17th International Conference on Information Technology–New Generations (ITNG 2020), Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 1134, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43020-7_7

A full list of articles and presentations authored by the principal investigators in Publications.


Downloading Data

Labeled Datasets, updated December, 2020

  • TextMining And CyberCrime Data (raw data)
  • GeneralData (Predation Labeled)
  • Formspring Labeled for Cyberbullying
  • MySpace Group Data Labeled for Cyberbullying

The data is available to the research community in Data.


Related scholarly literature and sources

Cyberbullying, discrimination, predation, and trafficking are important academic conversations that relate to our research. A small collection of relevant, scholarly literature is available in Literature.


Resources for getting help

If you are someone who is experiencing harm and danger, and wishes to get immediate help; please view a list of Resources that are available to you.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 0916152, 1421896, and 1812380. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

ChatCoder is proudly supported by E2 Unlimited Technologies