Constructing an inter-post similarity measure to differentiate the psychological stages in offensive chats

Offensive Internet chats, particularly the child-exploiting type, tend to follow a documented psychological behavioral pattern. Researchers have identified some important stages in this pattern. The psychological stages broadly include befriending, information exchange, grooming, and approach. Similarities among the posts of a chat play an important role in differentiating as well as in identifying these stages. In this article a novel similarity measure is constructed which gives high Inter-post-similarity among the chat-posts within a particular behavioral stage and low inter-post-similarity across different behavioral stages. A psychological stage corpus-based dictionary is constructed from mining the terms associated with each stage. The dictionary works as a background knowledge-base to support the similarity measure. To find the inter-post similarity a modified sentence similarity measure is used. The proposed measure gives improved recognition of inter-stage and intra-stage similarity among the chat posts compared with other types of similarity measures. The pairwise inter-post similarity is used for clustering chat-posts into the psychological stages. Results of experiments demonstrate that the new clustering method gives better results than some current clustering methods.