This guide promotes the use of sentiment analysis as a technique for analyzing the presence of human trafficking in escort ads pulled from the open web. Sentiment analysis of web data is an approach to discern the text writer’s affinity or negativity as expressed through her use of language and vocabulary. The prevalence of human trafficking has also democratized its presence in digital mediums and it is clear that the Internet has become a home for the proliferation of trafficking and for conducting trafficking as a business. Many websites have been widely used as a digital marketplace for predators and pimps to traffic victims through solicitation of services, especially in the area of sex-trafficking. Traditional techniques have not focused on sentiment as a textual cue of human trafficking and instead have focused on other visual cues (e.g., presence of tattoos in associated images), or textual cues (specific styles of ad-writing; keywords, etc.). This guide applies two widely cited sentiment analysis models: the Netflix and Stanford model, and also its own binary and categorical (multi- class) sentiment model using escort review data extracted from the open web. The individual model performances and exploratory analysis motivated researchers to construct two ensemble sentiment models that correctly serve as a feature proxy to identify human trafficking 53% of the time when evaluated against a set of 38,563 ads provided by the DARPA MEMEX project.

Ensemble Sentiment Analysis to Identify Human Trafficking in Web Data - Graph Techniques for Adversarial Activity Analytics, 2018 DOWNLOAD

post

page

attachment

revision

nav_menu_item

custom_css

customize_changeset

oembed_cache

user_request

wp_block

acf-field-group

acf-field

ai1ec_event

A stitch in time saved none: How fashion brands fueled violence in the factory and beyond
Guidance

This study documents women garment workers’ experiences of gender- based violence and harassment (GBVH) in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in Asian production countries. It elaborates “economic harm” as a form of GBVH, underscoring how the b...Read More

DEMAND. A Comparative Examination of Sex Tourism and Trafficking in Jamaica, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States
GuidancePublications

Sex tourism is the travel by buyers of sexual services for the purpose of procuring sexual services from another person in exchange for money and/or goods. Sex tourism can occur between countries or cities. Sex tourists create a demand which drives ...Read More

Recommendations for Addressing Forced Labor Risk in the Cocoa Sector of Côte D’Ivoire
Guidance

Forced Labor — and human trafficking for forced labor — have been documented as recently as 2018 in the cocoa sector in Côte d’Ivoire, with one recent study by the Walk Free Foundation and Tulane University estimating the number of victims at...Read More

Tainted Stones: Bonded Labor and Child Labor in the India-U.S. Sandstone Supply Chain
Guidance

Three million workers are employed in India’s sandstone mining industry on a seasonal basis, with nearly 90% of India’s sandstone produced in the state of Rajasthan. Although the Government of Rajasthan has issued thousands of mining licenses an...Read More