Chinese Spam Detection Using a Hybrid BiGRU-CNN Network with Joint Textual and Phonetic Embedding
Jinliang Yao, Chenrui Wang, Chuang Hu, Xiaoxi Huang
Abstract
The proliferation of spam in China has a negative impact on internet users’ experiences online. Existing methods for detecting spam are primarily based on machine learning. However, it has been discovered that these methods are susceptible to adversarial textual spam that has frequently been imperceptibly modified by spammers. Spammers continually modify their strategies to circumvent spam detection systems. Text with Chinese homophonic substitution may be easily understood by users according to its context. Currently, spammers widely use homophonic substitution to break down spam identification systems on the internet. To address these issues, we propose a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU)–Text Convolutional Neural Network (TextCNN) hybrid model with joint embedding for detecting Chinese spam. Our model effectively uses phonetic information and combines the advantages of parameter sharing from TextCNN with long-term memory from BiGRU. The experimental results on real-world datasets show that our model resists homophone noise to some extent and outperforms mainstream deep learning models. We also demonstrate the generality of joint textual and phonetic embedding, which is applicable to other deep learning networks in Chinese spam detection tasks.