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A hybrid framework for bot detection on twitter: Fusing digital DNA with BERT

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Abstract

With the recognition and influence of Twitter on modern society, an enormous amount of multimedia information is regularly generated and rapidly disseminated on the platform. These characteristics have caught the attention of automated accounts called bots that are frequently leveraged for malevolent activities. From distorting the political elections to crashing the stock markets to spreading conspiracy theories and fake news, various bot accounts have become a source of grave concern. Particularly, spambots have been known to mimic the behaviour of a legitimate user, making them almost insurmountable to detect. Of late, DNA inspired behaviour encoding of Twitter accounts such as B3Type, and B3Content DNA has achieved promising results in detecting the social spambots. However, the evolving nature of spambots drives academia and the industries to devise adaptive strategies to keep pace with the progressing capabilities of these spambots and curtail the menace caused by them. Therefore, this study proposes a hybrid technique utilizing digital DNA as a base approach and augmenting it with the state-of-the-art BERT model pre-trained on the sentiment classification task. The proposed hybrid encoding is termed B3Sentiment DNA. Further, the study extends B3Content encoding and proposes B5Content DNA encoding to make spambot detection more robust. B5Content encoding achieved an accuracy of 75.23%, surpassing B3Content encoding, while the proposed hybrid approach, B3Sentiment DNA, achieved an accuracy of 85.79%, significantly outperforming all the DNA encoding techniques considered in this study.

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Notes

  1. http://www.dianping.com/

  2. http://mib.projects.iit.cnr.it/dataset.html

  3. https://github.com/cgpotts/dynasent

  4. https://dynabench.org/

  5. https://github.com/twintproject/twint

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Vaishali Chawla & Yatin Kapoor

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  1. Vaishali Chawla
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  2. Yatin Kapoor
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Correspondence to Yatin Kapoor.

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Chawla, V., Kapoor, Y. A hybrid framework for bot detection on twitter: Fusing digital DNA with BERT. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 30831–30854 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14730-5

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