natural language processing
QAnon’s Psychological Influence: Investigating Q’s Digital Messaging
September 24, 2025This study uses a quantitative natural-language processing tool, the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), to evaluate the content of all Q drops over time, focusing on language themes associated with three core principles of psychological influence: cognitive, emotional, and social processes. Before detailing this study, we situate it within the broader contexts of national security ...
Down the Rabbit Hole: Detecting Online Extremism, Radicalisation, and Politicised Hate Speech
December 4, 2024Social media is a modern person’s digital voice to project and engage with new ideas and mobilise communities—a power shared with extremists. Given the societal risks of unvetted content-moderating algorithms for Extremism, Radicalisation, and Hate speech (ERH) detection, responsible software engineering must understand the who, what, when, where, and why such models are necessary to protect user safety and free expression. Hence, ...
‘Terrorism Informatics’ Part IV: Predicting Extremist Behaviour
August 8, 2024VOX-Pol Blog Post. ...
‘Terrorism Informatics’ Part II: Identifying Extremist Networks
August 8, 2024VOX-Pol Blog Post. ...
Exploring Cyberterrorism, Topic Models and Social Networks of Jihadists Dark Web Forums: A Computational Social Science Approach
September 18, 2023This three-article dissertation focuses on cyber-related topics on terrorist groups, specifically Jihadists’ use of technology, the application of natural language processing, and social networks in analyzing text data derived from terrorists’ Dark Web forums. The first article explores cybercrime and cyberterrorism. As technology progresses, it facilitates new forms of behavior, including tech-related crimes known as ...
A survey on extremism analysis using natural language processing: definitions, literature review, trends and challenges
September 18, 2023Extremism has grown as a global problem for society in recent years, especially after the apparition of movements such as jihadism. This and other extremist groups have taken advantage of different approaches, such as the use of Social Media, to spread their ideology, promote their acts and recruit followers. The extremist discourse, therefore, is reflected ...
An Ensemble Method for Radicalization and Hate Speech Detection Online Empowered by Sentic Computing
September 18, 2023The dramatic growth of the Web has motivated researchers to extract knowledge from enormous repositories and to exploit the knowledge in myriad applications. In this study, we focus on natural language processing (NLP) and, more concretely, the emerging field of affective computing to explore the automation of understanding human emotions from texts. This paper continues ...
4chan & 8chan embeddings
September 18, 2023We have collected over 30M messages from the publicly available /pol/ message boards on 4chan and 8chan, and compiled them into a model of toxic language use. The trained word embeddings (±0.4GB) are released for free and may be useful for further study on toxic discourse or to boost hate speech detection systems: textgain.com/8chan. ...