Investigative Knowledge Discovery for Combating Illicit Activities

Developing scalable, semi-automatic approaches to derive insights from a domain-specific Web corpus is a longstanding research problem in the knowledge discovery community. The problem is particularly challenging in illicit fields, such as human trafficking, where traditional assumptions concerning information representation are frequently violated. In this article, we describe an end-to-end investigative knowledge discovery system for illicit Web domains. We built and evaluated a prototype, involving separate components for information extraction, semantic modeling and query execution, on a real-world human trafficking Web corpus containing 1.3 million pages, with promising results.