Enhancing Online Grooming Detection via Backtranslation Augmentation

Abstract

Grooming minors for sexual exploitation become an increasingly significant concern in online conversation platforms. For a safer online experience for minors, machine learning models have been proposed to tap into explicit textual remarks and automate detecting predatory conversations. Such models, however, fall short of real-world applications for the sparse distribution of predatory conversations. In this paper, we propose backtranslation augmentation to augment training datasets with more predatory conversations. Through our experiments on 8 languages from 4 language families using 3 neural translators, we demonstrate that backtranslation augmentation improves models’ performance with fewer training epochs for better classification efficacy. Our code and experimental results are available at https://github.com/fani-lab/osprey/tree/coling25.