Content Based Classification of Short Messages using Recurrent Neural Networks in NLP

Short message spam poses a significant threat for all mobile phone users, as it can act as an efficient tool for cyberattacks including spreading malware and phishing. Traditional anti-spam measures are only minimally effective against modern spammers. Intelligent analysis of the content to categorise the messages as Spam (unwanted and unsolicited) or Ham (useful messages) is therefore essential to safeguard the user from such attacks. Various artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are proving to be useful in the analysis of the content of such short messages to classify and filter spam. We have trained, validated and tested seven such AI techniques on the SMS spam collection dataset to identify the best model for designing and developing a content based classification system. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) have shown the highest performance metrics (Test Accuracy: 99.28%) and hence our proposed system includes a RNN model for classification. A web app of this system has also been deployed where a single SMS can be input and the designed system can classify it as Spam or Ham. The designed system is compared against existing systems and is found to be significantly better.