Semi-Supervised Collaborative Learning for Social Spammer and Spam Message Detection in Microblogging

It is important to detect social spammers and spam messages in microblogging platforms. Existing methods usually handle the detection of social spammers and spam messages as two separate tasks using supervised learning techniques. However, labeled samples are usually scarce and manual annotation is expensive. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised collaborative learning approach to jointly detect social spammers and spam messages in microblogging platforms. In our approach, the social spammer classifier and spam message classifier are collaboratively trained by exploiting the inherent relatedness between these tasks. In addition, unlabeled samples are incorporated into model training with the help of social contexts of users and messages. Experiments on real-world dataset show our approach can effectively improve the performance of both social spammer detection and spam message detection.