Using a Probabilistic Model of Context to Detect Word Obfuscation

Sanaz Jabbari, Ben Allison, Louise Guthrie

Abstract
This paper proposes a distributional model of word use and word meaning which is derived purely from a body of text, and then applies this model to determine whether certain words are used in or out of context. We suggest that we can view the contexts of words as multinomially distributed random variables. We illustrate how using this basic idea, we can formulate the problem of detecting whether or not a word is used in context as a likelihood ratio test. We also define a measure of semantic relatedness between a word and its context using the same model. We assume that words that typically appear together are related, and thus have similar probability distributions and that words used in an unusual way will have probability distributions which are dissimilar from those of their surrounding context. The relatedness of a word to its context is based on Kullback-Leibler divergence between probability distributions assigned to the constituent words in the given sentence. We employed our methods on a defense-oriented application where certain words are substituted with other words in an intercepted communication.
Anthology ID:
L08-1549
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/560_paper.pdf
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Sanaz Jabbari, Ben Allison, and Louise Guthrie. 2008. Using a Probabilistic Model of Context to Detect Word Obfuscation. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Using a Probabilistic Model of Context to Detect Word Obfuscation (Jabbari et al., LREC 2008)
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http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/560_paper.pdf
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