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Pratheeksha Nair

pratheeksha.nair@mila.quebec
Doctorat - McGill University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e
Reihaneh Rabbany
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Github
Google Scholar

Publications

T-NET: Weakly Supervised Graph Learning for Combatting Human Trafficking
Pratheeksha Nair
Javin Liu
Catalina Vajiac
Andreas Olligschlaeger
Duen Horng Chau
Mirela T. Cazzolato
Cara Jones
Christos Faloutsos
Reihaneh Rabbany
Human trafficking (HT) for forced sexual exploitation, often described as modern-day slavery, is a pervasive problem that affects millions o… (voir plus)f people worldwide. Perpetrators of this crime post advertisements (ads) on behalf of their victims on adult service websites (ASW). These websites typically contain hundreds of thousands of ads including those posted by independent escorts, massage parlor agencies and spammers (fake ads). Detecting suspicious activity in these ads is difficult and developing data-driven methods is challenging due to the hard-to-label, complex and sensitive nature of the data. In this paper, we propose T-Net, which unlike previous solutions, formulates this problem as weakly supervised classification. Since it takes several months to years to investigate a case and obtain a single definitive label, we design domain-specific signals or indicators that provide weak labels. T-Net also looks into connections between ads and models the problem as a graph learning task instead of classifying ads independently. We show that T-Net outperforms all baselines on a real-world dataset of ads by 7% average weighted F1 score. Given that this data contains personally identifiable information, we also present a realistic data generator and provide the first publicly available dataset in this domain which may be leveraged by the wider research community.
2024-03-24
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publié)
doi.org
SWEET - Weakly Supervised Person Name Extraction for Fighting Human Trafficking
Javin Liu
Hao Yu
Vidya Sujaya
Pratheeksha Nair
Kellin Pelrine
Reihaneh Rabbany
In this work, we propose a weak supervision pipeline SWEET: Supervise Weakly for Entity Extraction to fight Trafficking for extracting perso… (voir plus)n names from noisy escort advertisements. Our method combines the simplicity of rule-matching (through antirules, i.e., negated rules) and the generalizability of large language models fine-tuned on benchmark, domain-specific and synthetic datasets, treating them as weak labels. One of the major challenges in this domain is limited labeled data. SWEET addresses this by obtaining multiple weak labels through labeling functions and effectively aggregating them. SWEET outperforms the previous supervised SOTA method for this task by 9% F1 score on domain data and better generalizes to common benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we also release HTGEN, a synthetically generated dataset of escort advertisements (built using ChatGPT) to facilitate further research within the community.
2023-12-01
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (publié)
doi.org
openreview.net
Social Media as a Vector for Escort Ads:A Study on OnlyFans advertisements on Twitter
Maricarmen Arenas
Pratheeksha Nair
Reihaneh Rabbany
Golnoosh Farnadi
Online sex trafficking is on the rise and a majority of trafficking victims report being advertised online. The use of OnlyFans as a platfor… (voir plus)m for adult content is also increasing, with Twitter as its main advertising tool. Furthermore, we know that traffickers usually work within a network and control multiple victims. Consequently, we suspect that there may be networks of traffickers promoting multiple OnlyFans accounts belonging to their victims. To this end, we present the first study of OnlyFans advertisements on Twitter in the context of finding organized activities. Preliminary analysis of this space shows that most tweets related to OnlyFans contain generic text, making text-based methods less reliable. Instead, focusing on what ties the authors of these tweets together, we propose a novel method for uncovering coordinated networks of users based on their behaviour. Our method, called Multi-Level Clustering (MLC), combines two levels of clustering that considers both the network structure as well as embedded node attribute information. It focuses jointly on user connections (through mentions) and content (through shared URLs). We apply MLC to real-world data of 2 million tweets pertaining to OnlyFans and analyse the detected groups. We also evaluate our method on synthetically generated data (with injected ground truth) and show its superior performance compared to competitive baselines. Finally, we discuss examples of organized clusters as case studies and provide interesting conclusions to our study.
2023-04-30
Proceedings of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023 (publié)
doi.org
TrafficVis: Visualizing Organized Activity and Spatio-Temporal Patterns for Detecting and Labeling Human Trafficking
Catalina Vajiac
Duen Horng Chau
Andreas Olligschlaeger
Rebecca Mackenzie
Pratheeksha Nair
Meng-Chieh Lee
Yifei Li
Namyong Park
Reihaneh Rabbany
Christos Faloutsos
Law enforcement and domain experts can detect human trafficking (HT) in online escort websites by analyzing suspicious clusters of connected… (voir plus) ads. How can we explain clustering results intuitively and interactively, visualizing potential evidence for experts to analyze? We present TrafficVis, the first interface for cluster-level HT detection and labeling. Developed through months of participatory design with domain experts, TrafficVis provides coordinated views in conjunction with carefully chosen backend algorithms to effectively show spatio-temporal and text patterns to a wide variety of anti-HT stakeholders. We build upon state-of-the-art text clustering algorithms by incorporating shared metadata as a signal of connected and possibly suspicious activity, then visualize the results. Domain experts can use TrafficVis to label clusters as HT, or other, suspicious, but non-HT activity such as spam and scam, quickly creating labeled datasets to enable further HT research. Through domain expert feedback and a usage scenario, we demonstrate TRAFFICVIS's efficacy. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with repeated high praises for the usability and explainability of our tool, the latter being vital for indicting possible criminals.
2023-01-01
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (publié)
doi.org
VisPaD: Visualization and Pattern Discovery for Fighting Human Trafficking
Pratheeksha Nair
Yifei Li
Catalina Vajiac
Andreas Olligschlaeger
Meng-Chieh Lee
Namyong Park
Duen Horng Chau
Christos Faloutsos
Reihaneh Rabbany
Chieh Lee
2022-04-25
The Web Conference (publié)
doi.org
VisPaD: Visualization and Pattern Discovery for Fighting Human Trafficking
Pratheeksha Nair
Yifei Li
Catalina Vajiac
Andreas Olligschlaeger
Meng-Chieh Lee
Namyong Park
Duen Horng Chau
Christos Faloutsos
Reihaneh Rabbany
Chieh Lee
Human trafficking analysts investigate groups of related online escort advertisements (called micro-clusters) to detect suspicious activitie… (voir plus)s and identify various modus operandi. This task is complex as it requires finding patterns and linked meta-data across micro-clusters such as the geographical spread of ads, cluster sizes, etc. Additionally, drawing insights from the data is challenging without visualizing these micro-clusters. To address this, in close-collaboration with domain experts, we built VisPaD, a novel interactive way for characterizing and visualizing micro-clusters and their associated meta-data, all in one place. VisPaD helps discover underlying patterns in the data by projecting micro-clusters in a lower dimensional space. It also allows the user to select micro-clusters involved in suspicious patterns and interactively examine them leading to faster detection and identification of trends in the data. A demo of VisPaD is also released1.
2022-04-25
The Web Conference (published)
doi.org
Extracting Person Names from User Generated Text: Named-Entity Recognition for Combating Human Trafficking
Yifei Li
Pratheeksha Nair
Kellin Pelrine
Reihaneh Rabbany
2022-01-01
Findings (publié)
doi.org
Extracting Person Names from User Generated Text: Named-Entity Recognition for Combating Human Trafficking
Yifei Li
Pratheeksha Nair
Kellin Pelrine
Reihaneh Rabbany
Online escort advertisement websites are widely used for advertising victims of human trafficking. Domain experts agree that advertising mul… (voir plus)tiple people in the same ad is a strong indicator of trafficking. Thus, extracting person names from the text of these ads can provide valuable clues for further analysis. However, Named-Entity Recognition (NER) on escort ads is challenging because the text can be noisy, colloquial and often lacking proper grammar and punctuation. Most existing state-of-the-art NER models fail to demonstrate satisfactory performance in this task. In this paper, we propose NEAT (Name Extraction Against Trafficking) for extracting person names. It effectively combines classic rule-based and dictionary extractors with a contextualized language model to capture ambiguous names (e.g penny, hazel) and adapts to adversarial changes in the text by expanding its dictionary. NEAT shows 19% improvement on average in the F1 classification score for name extraction compared to previous state-of-the-art in two domain-specific datasets.
2022-01-01
Findings (published)
doi.org
RAFFIC V IS : Fighting Human Trafficking through Visualization
Catalina Vajiac
Andreas Olligschlaeger
Yifei Li
Pratheeksha Nair
Meng-Chieh Lee
Namyong Park
Reihaneh Rabbany
Duen Horng Chau
Christos Faloutsos
Law enforcement can detect human trafficking (HT) in online escort websites by analyzing suspicious clusters of connected ads. Given such cl… (voir plus)usters, how can we interactively visualize potential evidence for law enforcement and domain experts? We present TRAFFICVIS, which, to our knowledge, is the first interface for cluster-level HT detection and labeling. It builds on state-of-the-art HT clustering algorithms by incorporating metadata as a signal of organized and potentially suspicious activity. Also, domain experts can label clusters as HT, spam, and more, efficiently creating labeled datasets to enable further HT research. TRAFFICVIS has been built in close collaboration with domain experts, who estimate that TRAFFICVIS provides a median 36x speedup over manual labeling.
2021-01-01
(publié)
www.semanticscholar.org
Global Surveillance of COVID-19 by mining news media using a multi-source dynamic embedded topic model
Yue Li
Pratheeksha Nair
Zhi Wen
Imane Chafi
Anya Okhmatovskaia
Guido Powell
Yannan Shen
David Buckeridge
2020-11-10
Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics (publié)
doi.org