Detecting multiple aliases in social media

Monitoring and analysis of web forums is becoming important for intelligence analysts around the globe since terrorists and extremists are using forums for spreading propaganda and communicating with each other. Various tools for analyzing the content of forum postings and identifying aliases that need further inspection by analysts have been proposed throughout literature, but a problem related to this is that individuals can make use of several aliases. In this paper we propose a number of matching techniques for detecting forum users who make use of multiple aliases. By combining different techniques such as time profiling and stylometric analysis of messages the accuracy of recognizing users with multiple aliases increases, as shown in experiments conducted on the ICWSM dataset boards.ie.