Cara Jones
2017
Combating Human Trafficking with Multimodal Deep Models
Edmund Tong
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Amir Zadeh
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Cara Jones
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Louis-Philippe Morency
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Human trafficking is a global epidemic affecting millions of people across the planet. Sex trafficking, the dominant form of human trafficking, has seen a significant rise mostly due to the abundance of escort websites, where human traffickers can openly advertise among at-will escort advertisements. In this paper, we take a major step in the automatic detection of advertisements suspected to pertain to human trafficking. We present a novel dataset called Trafficking-10k, with more than 10,000 advertisements annotated for this task. The dataset contains two sources of information per advertisement: text and images. For the accurate detection of trafficking advertisements, we designed and trained a deep multimodal model called the Human Trafficking Deep Network (HTDN).