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It is quite sad that we have to use actual people (Mechnical Turk) to simply filter out the garbage. We've more or less figured out how to train spam preventio
by pacemkr 17y ago
It is quite sad that we have to use actual people (Mechnical Turk) to simply filter out the garbage.
We've more or less figured out how to train spam prevention systems. How is "troll prevention" a fundamentally different problem?
- DTrejo 17y agoMaybe trolls are less smart than spammers, but a troll's goal is more amorphous. Can filters catch sarcasm, negative tone, or lack of intelligent thought?
- paraschopra 17y agoYour answer: the stupid filter - http://stupidfilter.org/main/index.php http://stupidfilter.org/main/index.php
- Semiapies 17y agoThis is a very hard problem and I remain skeptical of this project. For instance, a test phrase I ran through the online demo: "lol this will never work you stupid wankers get a real job" Result? "Not likely to be stupid."
- endtime 17y agoSpam is automated, trolling isn't. So it makes sense that spam detection is easier to automate than troll detection. A different way to say just about the same thing: Trolling can be customized to a specific context, it can rely on sarcasm or social references, etc. I don't think there exists any NLP system that can pick up e.g. written sarcasm.
- jasonkester 17y agoSpam is not automated anymore. Automated spam doesn't get through modern countermeasures such as human-detection and bayesian filtering, so it is not worth considering. The spam that you actually see today on most sites is hand-pasted by real human beings (at least the stuff that makes it onto my site is. I'm sure you can still find plenty of phpbb sites that are overrun with the old sort). It's hard to do anything about because they'll simply strip the content of an article that would fit well on your site, and stick a link at the bottom. Or maybe they'll skip the link for the first dozen blog entries until they think they've gained your trust. Real spam (versus the wikispam v1agra stuff that gets automatically swatted down) is tricky. And these people are a lot more motivated than trolls, since they get paid when they get a working link on your site.
- endtime 17y ago> Real spam...is tricky Okay, fair enough, but then it's not the spam pacemkr was talking about.
- pacemkr 17y agoI've actually seen my share of this type of spam as well. Lucky for us all of it came through Indian IPs, while our users were all from the US. They are really getting creative. They WILL post several messages to "gain your trust" before they throw in a link. I can't believe all this effort is really worth it for whomever is sponsoring this "human spam".
- pacemkr 17y agoI was thinking more along the lines of an aide to existing human moderators. If you start with a clean slate for each particular website and then use the moderation queue information to slowly train the system. Maybe, just maybe that would be enough. If not, then why not take the context into account as well? Context based troll filter. Whenever a troll posts something there is usually a resulting discussing with a healthy dose of profanity. We can all just glance at such messages and say with complete certainty that it brings no value, certainly that means there are existing patterns.