Towards discovering criminal communities from textual data

In many criminal cases, forensically collected data contain valuable information about a suspect’s social networks. An investigator often has to manually extract information from the collected text documents and enter it into a police database for further investigation with criminal network analysis tools. In this paper, we propose a method to discover criminal communities, to analyze the closeness of the members in the communities, and to extract useful information for crime investigation directly from the text documents. The proposed method, together with the implemented software tool, has received positive feedbacks from the digital forensics team of a law enforcement unit in Canada. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.2.8 [Database Management]: Database Applications— data mining; I.7.5 [Document and Text Processing]: Document Capture—document analysis; K.4.2 [Computers and Society]: Social Issues—abuse and crime involving computers Keywords Forensic analysis, data mining,...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Rabeah Al-Zaidy, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Amr M. Youssef
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Forensics Team, Network Analysis Tools, Police Database, SAC 2011