Enhancing Detection of Arabic Social Spam Using Data Augmentation and Machine Learning

In recent years, people have tended to use online social platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, to communicate with families and friends, read the latest news, and discuss social issues. As a result, spam content can easily spread across them. Spam detection is considered one of the important tasks in text analysis. Previous spam detection research focused on English content, with less attention to other languages, such as Arabic, where labeled data are often hard to obtain. In this paper, an integrated framework for Twitter spam detection is proposed to overcome this problem. This framework integrates data augmentation, natural language processing, and supervised machine learning algorithms to overcome the problems of detection of Arabic spam on the Twitter platform. The word embedding technique is employed to augment the data using pre-trained word embedding vectors. Different machine learning techniques were applied, such as SVM, Naive Bayes, and Logistic Regression for spam detection. To prove the effectiveness of this model, a real-life data set for Arabic tweets have been collected and labeled. The results show that an overall improvement in the use of data augmentation increased the macro F1 score from 58% to 89%, with an overall accuracy of 92%, which outperform the current state of the art.