Cybersecurity information is often technically complex and relayed through unstructured text, making automation of cyber threat intelligence highly challenging. For such text domains that involve high levels of expertise, pretraining on in-domain corpora has been a popular method for language models to obtain domain expertise. However, cybersecurity texts often contain non-linguistic elements (such as URLs and hash values) that could be unsuitable with the established pretraining methodologies. Previous work in other domains have removed or filtered such text as noise, but the effectiveness of these methods have not been investigated, especially in the cybersecurity domain. We experiment with different pretraining methodologies to account for non-linguistic elements (NLEs) and evaluate their effectiveness through downstream tasks and probing tasks. Our proposed strategy, a combination of selective MLM and jointly training NLE token classification, outperforms the commonly taken approach of replacing NLEs. We use our domain-customized methodology to train CyBERTuned, a cybersecurity domain language model that outperforms other cybersecurity PLMs on most tasks.

Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (TMSC) aims to perform sentiment polarity on a target jointly considering its corresponding multiple modalities including text, image, and others. Current researches mainly work on either of two types of targets in a decentralized manner. One type is entity, such as a person name, a location name, etc. and the other is aspect, such as ‘food’, ‘service’, etc. We believe that this target type based division in task modelling is not necessary because the sentiment polarity of the specific target is not governed by its type but its context. For this reason, we propose a unified model for target-oriented multimodal sentiment classification, so called UnifiedTMSC. It is prompt-based language modelling and performs well on four datasets spanning the above two target types. Specifically, we design descriptive prompt paraphrasing to reformulate TMSC task via (1) task paraphrasing, which obtains paraphrased prompts based on the task description through a paraphrasing rule, and (2) image prefix tuning, which optimizes a small continuous image vector throughout the multimodal representation space of text and images. Conducted on two entity-level multimodal datasets: Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017, and two aspect-level multimodal datasets: Multi-ZOL and MASAD, the experimental results show the effectiveness of our UnifiedTMSC.

Recent research has suggested that there are clear differences in the language used in the Dark Web compared to that of the Surface Web. As studies on the Dark Web commonly require textual analysis of the domain, language models specific to the Dark Web may provide valuable insights to researchers. In this work, we introduce DarkBERT, a language model pretrained on Dark Web data. We describe the steps taken to filter and compile the text data used to train DarkBERT to combat the extreme lexical and structural diversity of the Dark Web that may be detrimental to building a proper representation of the domain. We evaluate DarkBERT and its vanilla counterpart along with other widely used language models to validate the benefits that a Dark Web domain specific model offers in various use cases. Our evaluations show that DarkBERT outperforms current language models and may serve as a valuable resource for future research on the Dark Web.