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In recent years, there has been a rise in drug trafficking and other illicit activities that utilize social media. Criminals increasingly use covert “dark jargon”— secret code words and terms that combine common words to disguise their meanings—making it difficult for authorities to identify and stop illegal activities. To stay ahead of law enforcement, offenders rapidly evolve their terminology, forcing authorities into a relentless game of catch-up.
Researchers from the University of Electro-Communications (UEC) have developed an advanced AI system designed to address this challenge. Their innovative approach focuses on detecting compound dark jargon—multiple words often used together to represent illicit substances or activities—by analyzing word relationships in social media posts. This groundbreaking system, detailed in the Journal of Information Processing, offers a far more accurate detection method compared to traditional text analysis tools.
Conventional detection methods break sentences into individual words, which can result in missing dark jargon made up of word pairs. These terms, which refer to illegal substances, would typically be split apart, evading detection. According to TechXplore, The new AI system, however, recognizes frequent word pairs and analyzes their contextual use, allowing it to identify dark jargon even when they are newly formed.
In tests, the system outperformed previous methods, increasing detection accuracy by 7%. More importantly, in interviews with law enforcement officers, 93% of the newly detected dark jargon was confirmed as unknown terms. This highlights the AI’s potential to uncover emerging jargon before it becomes widespread, offering a crucial advantage in the fight against online crime.
This AI-driven solution offers law enforcement a dynamic tool to track evolving dark jargon and respond quickly to emerging threats. This cutting-edge technology represents a significant leap forward in combating crime, providing a scalable, adaptive solution that can evolve alongside the criminals it seeks to expose.
