Detecting Predatory Behavior in Game Chats

While games are a popular social media for children, there is a real risk that these children are exposed to potential sexual assault. A number of studies have already addressed this issue, however, the data used in previous research did not properly represent the real chats found in multiplayer online games. To address this issue, we obtained real chat data from MovieStarPlanet, a massively multiplayer online game for children. The research described in this paper aimed to detect predatory behaviors in the chats using machine learning methods. In order to achieve a high accuracy on this task, extensive preprocessing was necessary. We describe three different strategies for data selection and preprocessing, and extensively compare the performance of different learning algorithms on the different data sets and features.