30 Oct 2013

In the lab meeting on 30th October, Richard Frank and Piper Jackson will give a talk about their NLP-related project in Criminology. A short description is attached below:

In today’s world security is of great concern, and we frequently hear of violent extremists committing violent acts (shootings, for example). We, in the School of Criminology, are using a custom-built web-crawler to study extremist webpages for the purpose of recruitment. Currently webpages are evaluated and categorized manually for content, and there are a very large number of pages to evaluate. This specific research aims to use NLP and Semantic Analysis to (semi-)automatically evaluate each body of text to determine the topic and sentiment within the text. Eventually the goal is to automatically distinguish these violent extremist webpages from webpages discussing the same events from a security point of view (for example, a government site), or from a neutral point of view (for example, a news source reporting the event).

The talk will be from 1130 hours at TASC1 9408.