The Use of Computational Text-Mining Methods to Understand and Detect Intimate Partner Abuse

The project seeks to use computational text mining and information retrieval methods to research intimate partner abuse in large datasets. The work is split into three parts: 1) applying computational text mining to recognise reports of psychological abuse on social media forums, and examine the prevalence and content of these reports; 2) using computational text analysis to investigate the prevalence of Non-Fatal Strangulation and tech-facilitated stalking and harassment in a large dataset of police case summaries; and 3) the collection and analysis of a pseudonymised corpus of abusive text messages between intimate partners, as a preliminary step towards training a machine learning model to automatically recognise abusive text messages.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity will train over 55 experts in multi-disciplinary aspects of cybersecurity, from engineering to crime science and public policy.

Short term impacts are associated with the research outputs of the 55+ research projects that will be undertaken as part of the doctoral studies of CDT students. Each project will tackle an important cybersecurity problem, propose and evaluate solutions, interventions and policy options. Students will publish those in international peer-reviewed journals, but also disseminate those through blog posts and material geared towards decision makers and experts in adjacent fields. Through industry placements relating to their projects, all students will have the opportunity to implement and evaluate their ideas within real-world organizations, to achieve short term impact in solving cybersecurity problems.

In the longer term graduates of the CDT will assume leading positions within industry, goverment, law enforcement, the third sector and academia to increase the capacity of the UK in being a leader in cybersecurity. From those leadership positions they will assess options and formulate effective interventions to tackle cybercrime, secure the UK's infrastructure, establish norms of cooperation between industries and government to secure IT systems, and become leading researcher and scholars further increasing the UK's capacity in cybersecurity in the years to come. The last impact is likely to be significant give that currently many higher education training programs do not have capacity to provide cybersecurity training at undergraduate or graduate levels, particularly in non-technical fields.

The full details of our plan to achieve impact can be found in the "Pathways to Impact" document.