Visualization and Detection of Multiple Aliases in Social Media

Abstract: Monitoring and analysis of web forums are becoming important for intelligence analysts around the globe since terrorists and extremists are using forums for spreading propaganda and communicating with each other. Various tools for analyzing the content of forum postings and identifying aliases that need further inspection by analysts have been proposed throughout literature. But a problem related to web forums is that individuals can make use of several aliases and conceal their identity. In this thesis work we propose a number of matching techniques for detecting forum users who make use of multiple aliases. By combining  different techniques such as time profiling and stylometric analysis of messages the accuracy of recognizing users with multiple aliases increases, as shown in experiments conducted on the (ICWSM) International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Dataset Boards.ie Dataset.