Arabic Twitter User Profiling: Application To Cyber-Security

In recent years, we witnessed a rapid growth of social media networking and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter. In these sites, users provide a variety of data such as their personal data, interests, and opinions. However, this data shared is not always true. Often, social media users hide behind a fake profile and may use it to spread rumors or threaten others. To address that, different methods and techniques were proposed for user profiling. In this article, we use machine learning for user profiling in order to predict the age and gender of a user's profile and we assess whether it is a dangerous profile using the users' tweets and features. Our approach uses several stylistic features such as characters based, words based and syntax based. Moreover, the topics of interest of a user are included in the profiling task. We obtained the best accuracy levels with SVM and these were respectively 73.49% for age, 83.7% for gender, and 88.7% for the dangerous profile detection.