FlagIt: A System for Minimally Supervised Human Trafficking Indicator Mining

Abstract: In this paper, we describe and study the indicator mining problem in the online sex advertising domain. We present an in-development system, FlagIt (Flexible and adaptive generation of Indicators from text), which combines the benefits of both a lightweight expert system and classical semi-supervision (heuristic re-labeling) with recently released state-of-the-art unsupervised text embeddings to tag millions of sentences with indicators that are highly correlated with human trafficking. The FlagIt technology stack is open source. On preliminary evaluations involving five indicators, FlagIt illustrates promising performance compared to several alternatives. The system is being actively developed, refined and integrated into a domain-specific search system used by over 200 law enforcement agencies to combat human trafficking, and is being aggressively extended to mine at least six more indicators with minimal programming effort. FlagIt is a good example of a system that operates in limited label settings, and that requires creative combinations of established machine learning techniques to produce outputs that could be used by real-world non-technical analysts.