N-Gram-Based Recognition of Threatening Tweets

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate to what degree it is possible to recognize threats in Dutch tweets. We attempt threat recognition on the basis of only the single tweet (without further context) and using only very simple recognition features, namely n-grams. We present two different methods of n-gram-based recognition, one based on manually constructed n-gram patterns and the other on machine learned patterns. Our evaluation is not restricted to precision and recall scores, but also looks into the difference in yield of the two methods, considering either combination or means that may help refine both methods individually.