DarkJargon.net: A Platform for Understanding Underground Conversation with Latent Meaning

Dominic Seyler, Wei Liu, Yunan Zhang, Xiao Feng Wang, Cheng Xiang Zhai

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

An essential part of underground conversation are dark jargon terms. They are benign-looking, but have hidden, sometimes sinister meanings and are used by participants of underground forums for illicit behavior. For example, the dark term "rat"is often used in lieu of "Remote Access Trojan". We present a novel online platform that caters to the understating of underground conversation with latent meaning. Our system enables researchers, law enforcement agents and "white-hat"hackers to gain invaluable insights into underground communication by providing them with a tool to (1) look-up dark jargon terms in a dictionary; (2) explore the usage of dark jargon over time and interpret their meaning; (3) collaborate and contribute their own research findings. Furthermore, we introduce a novel dark jargon interpretation method that leverages masked language modeling of a transformer-based architecture.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGIR 2021 - Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages2526-2530
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781450380379
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 11 2021
Event44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2021 - Virtual, Online, Canada
Duration: Jul 11 2021Jul 15 2021

Publication series

NameSIGIR 2021 - Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

Conference

Conference44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2021
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVirtual, Online
Period7/11/217/15/21

Keywords

  • dark jargon interpretation
  • dark net
  • underground forum

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Information Systems

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