Sentiment and affect analysis of dark web forums: Measuring radicalization on the internet

Dark Web forums are heavily used by extremist and terrorist groups for communication, recruiting, ideology sharing, and radicalization. These forums often have relevance to the Iraqi insurgency or Al-Qaeda and are of interest to security and intelligence organizations. This paper presents an automated approach to sentiment and affect analysis of selected radical international Jihadist Dark Web forums. The approach incorporates a rich textual feature representation and machine learning techniques to identify and measure the sentiment polarities and affect intensities expressed in forum communications. The results of sentiment and affect analysis performed on two large-scale Dark Web forums are presented, offering insight into the communities and participants.