Features for Modelling Characteristics of Conversations

In this experiment, we find that features which model interaction and conversational behaviour contribute well to identifying sexual grooming behaviour in chat and forum text. Together with the obviously useful lexical features — which we find are more valuable if separated by who generates them — we achieve very successful results in identifying behavioural patterns which may characterise sexual grooming. We conjecture that the general framework can be used for other purposes than this specific case if the lexical features are exchanged for other topical models, the conversational features characterise interaction and behaviour rather than topical choice.