Design consideration for improved term weighting scheme for pornographic web sites

Abstract

Illicit Web content filtering is a content- based analysis technique, applied to censor inappropriate contents on the Internet. Web content filtering can recognize undesirable contents through the application of AI techniques, linguistic analysis, or machine learning to classify Web pages into a set of predefined categories. However, the capacity to distinguish between useful and harmful Web content remains a major research challenge, which usually leads to the problem of underblocking and over- blocking. Further, the extraction of best term representation for classifier presents a major limitation due to curse of dimensionality, where a feature can have the same term frequency (TF) in two or more categories but has different semantic meanings such as illicit pornography and sex education context also known as ambiguous issues. Besides, the high dimensionality of features on a Web page, even for moderate size, it has made the term representation value for classifier more complex, which affects the performance of classification. Thus, this research proposes a modified term weighting scheme (TWS) for narrative and discrete Web in order to increase the classification performance. Characteristics of pornography Web site were extracted and significant characteristics were identified and mapped against term weighting factors. Initial result revealed that other criteria such as rare feature have potential to be regarded as significant criteria in TWS technique to distinguish high- similarity Web content.