@inproceedings{albarrak-etal-2024-u,
    title = "{U}-{BERT}opic: An Urgency-Aware {BERT}-Topic Modeling Approach for Detecting {C}yber{S}ecurity Issues via Social Media",
    author = "Albarrak, Majed  and
      Pergola, Gabriele  and
      Jhumka, Arshad",
    editor = "Mitkov, Ruslan  and
      Ezzini, Saad  and
      Ranasinghe, Tharindu  and
      Ezeani, Ignatius  and
      Khallaf, Nouran  and
      Acarturk, Cengiz  and
      Bradbury, Matthew  and
      El-Haj, Mo  and
      Rayson, Paul",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security",
    month = jul,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Lancaster, UK",
    publisher = "International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/moar-dois/2024.nlpaics-1.22/",
    pages = "196--211",
    abstract = "For computer systems to remain secure, timely information about system vulnerabilities and security threats are vital. Such information can be garnered from various sources, most notably from social media platforms. However, such information may often lack context and structure and, more importantly, are often unlabelled. For such media to act as alert systems, it is important to be able to first distinguish among the topics being discussed. Subsequently, identifying the nature of the threat or vulnerability is of importance as this will influence the remedial actions to be taken, e.g., is the threat imminent? In this paper, we propose U-BERTopic, an urgency-aware BERTtopic modelling approach for detecting cybersecurity issues through social media, by integrating sentiment analysis with contextualized topic modelling like BERTopic. We compare UBERTopic against three other topic modelling techniques using four different evaluation metrics for topic modelling and cybersecurity classification by running on a 2018 cyber security-related Twitter dataset. Our results show that (i) for topic modelling and under certain settings (e.g., number of topics), U-BERTopic often outperforms all other topic modelling techniques and (ii) for attack classification, U-BERTopic performs better for some attacks such as vulnerability identification in some settings."
}