Papers by Benjamin Ashpole
MATCHED: Multimodal Authorship-Attribution To Combat Human Trafficking in Escort-Advertisement Data (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for human trafficking detection ignore the multimodal nature of online ads . sex trafficking is a pervasive crime exploiting individuals of all ages and genders . |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimodal authorship attributes to identify suspicious ads that combine text and images to improve vendor identification and verification tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods for vendor identification and verification tasks using text-only, vision-only and multimodal training objectives. |
IDTraffickers: An Authorship Attribution Dataset to link and connect Potential Human-Trafficking Operations on Text Escort Advertisements (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a significant number of human trafficking cases are associated with online advertisements . identification of HT vendors is challenging for law enforcement agencies . |
| Approach: | IDTraffickers uses 87,595 text ads and 5,244 vendor labels to link HT vendors . a macro-F1 score is achieved in a closed-set classification environment . |
| Outcome: | IDTraffickers is a dataset that enables verification and identification of HT vendors . the model achieves a macro-F1 score in a closed-set classification environment . |