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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Multilingual Vandalism Detection using Language-Independent &amp; Ex Post Facto Evidence</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Andrew G. West</string-name>
          <email>westand@cis.upenn.edu</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Insup Lee</string-name>
          <email>lee@cis.upenn.edu</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Dept. of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>PA</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="US">USA</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2011</year>
      </pub-date>
      <abstract>
        <p>There is much literature on Wikipedia vandalism detection. However, this writing addresses two facets given little treatment to date. First, prior efforts emphasize zero-delay detection, classifying edits the moment they are made. If classification can be delayed (e.g., compiling offline distributions), it is possible to leverage ex post facto evidence. This work describes/evaluates several features of this type, which we find to be overwhelmingly strong vandalism indicators. Second, English Wikipedia has been the primary test-bed for research. Yet, Wikipedia has 200+ language editions and use of localized features impairs portability. This work implements an extensive set of language-independent indicators and evaluates them using three corpora (German, English, Spanish). The work then extends to include language-specific signals. Quantifying their performance benefit, we find that such features can moderately increase classifier accuracy, but significant effort and language fluency are required to capture this utility. Aside from these novel aspects, this effort also broadly addresses the task, implementing 65 total features. Evaluation produces 0.840 PR-AUC on the zerodelay task and 0.906 PR-AUC with ex post facto evidence (averaging languages). Performance matches the state-of-the-art (English), sets novel baselines (German, Spanish), and is validated by a first-place finish over the 2011 PAN-CLEF test set.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>
        Unconstructive or ill-intentioned edits (i.e., vandalism) on Wikipedia erode the
encyclopedia’s reputation and waste the utility of those who must locate/remove the damage.
Moreover, while Wikipedia is the focus of this work, these are issues that affect all wiki
environments and collaborative software [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ]. Classifiers capable of detecting vandalism
can mitigate these issues by autonomously undoing poor edits or prioritizing human
efforts in locating them. Numerous proposals have addressed this need, as well surveyed
in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2 ref6 ref9">2,6,9</xref>
        ]. These techniques span multiple domains, including natural language
processing (NLP), reputation algorithms, and metadata analysis. Recently, our own prior
work [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] combined the leading approaches from these domains to establish a new
performance baseline; our technique herein borrows heavily from that effort.
      </p>
      <p>
        The 2011 edition of the PAN-CLEF vandalism detection competition, however, has
slightly redefined the task relative to the 2010 competition [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ] and the bulk of existing
anti-vandalism research. In particular, two differences have motivated novel analysis
and feature development. First, the prior edition permitted only zero-delay features: an
edit simultaneously committed and evaluated at time tn can only leverage information
from time t ≤ tn. However, if evaluation can be delayed until time tn+m, it is
possible to use ex post facto evidence from the tn &lt; t ≤ tn+m interval to aid predictive
efforts. While such features are not relevant for “gate-keeping,” they still have
applications. For example, the presence of vandalism would severely undermine static content
distributions like the Wikipedia 1.0 project1, which targets educational settings. This
work describes/evaluates several ex post facto features and finds them to be very strong
vandalism predictors.
      </p>
      <p>
        The second redefinition is that this year’s corpus contains edits from three
languages: German, English, and Spanish. Prior research, however, has been conducted
almost exclusively in English, and the 2010 PAN-CLEF winning approach heavily
utilized English-specific dictionaries [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6 ref8">6,8</xref>
        ]. Such techniques do not lend themselves to
portability across Wikipedia’s 200+ language editions, motivating the use of
languageindependent features. While these are capable of covering much of the problem space,
we find the addition of language-specific features still moderately improves classifier
performance. Orthogonal to the issue of portability, we also use the multiple corpora to
examine the consistency of feature performance across language versions.
      </p>
      <p>
        While discussion concentrates on these novel aspects, we also implement a breadth
of features (65 in total). Performance measures, as detailed in Sec. 3.2, vary based on
language and task. The complete feature set produces cross-validation results consistent
with the state-of-the-art for English [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] and establishes novel performance benchmarks
for Spanish and German (PR-AUC=0.91, weighing languages equally). Though
performance varied considerably over the label-withheld PAN-CLEF 2011 test set, our
approach took first-place in the associated competition, reinforcing its status as the most
accurate known approach to vandalism classification.
2
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Feature Set</title>
      <p>This section describes the features implemented. Discussion begins with a core
featureset that is both zero-delay and language independent (Sec. 2.1). Then, two extensions to
that set are handled: ex post facto (Sec. 2.2) and language-specific (Sec. 2.3). Any
feature which cannot be calculated directly from the provided corpus utilizes the Wikipedia
API2. Readers should consult cited works to learn about the algorithms and parameters
of complex features (i.e., reputations and lower-order classifiers).</p>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>2.1 Zero-Delay, Language-Independent Features</title>
        <p>Tab. 1 presents features that are: (1) zero-delay and (2) language-independent. Note that
features utilizing standardized language localization are included in this category (e.g.,
“User Talk” in English, is “Benutzer Diskussion” in German).</p>
        <p>
          Nearly all of these features have been described in prior work [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2 ref6">2,6</xref>
          ], so their
discussion is abbreviated here. Even so, these signals are fundamental to our overall approach,
given that a single implementation is portable across all language versions. This is
precisely why an extensive quantity of these features have been encoded.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:1.0
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
        </p>
        <p>USR_IS_IP
USR_IS_BOT</p>
        <p>USR_AGE
USR_BLK_BEFORE</p>
        <p>USR_PG_SIZE
USR_PG_WARNS</p>
        <p>USR_EDITS_*
USR_EDITS_DENSE</p>
        <p>USR_REP
USR_COUNTRY_REP</p>
        <p>USR_HAS_RB
USR_LAST_RB</p>
        <p>ART_AGE</p>
        <p>ART_EDITS_*
ART_EDITS_DENSE</p>
        <p>ART_SIZE</p>
        <p>ART_SIZE_DELT
ART_CHURN_CHARS</p>
        <p>ART_CHURN_BLKS</p>
        <p>ART_REP
TIME_TOD
TIME_DOW</p>
        <p>COMM_LEN</p>
        <p>COMM_HAS_SEC
COMM_LEN_NO_SEC</p>
        <p>COMM_IND_VAND</p>
        <p>WT_NO_DELAY
PREV_TIME_AGO</p>
        <p>PREV_USR_IP
PREV_USR_SAME
LANG_CHAR_REP</p>
        <p>LANG_UCASE</p>
        <p>LANG_ALPHA
LANG_LONG_TOK</p>
        <p>LANG_MARKUP</p>
        <p>
          Whether the editor is anonymous/IP, or a registered editor
Whether the editor has the “bot” flag (i.e., non-human user)
Time, in seconds, since the editor’s first ever edit
Whether the editor has been blocked at any point in the past
Size, in bytes, of the editor’s “user talk” page
Quantity of vandalism warnings on editor’s “user talk” (EN only)
Editor’s revisions in last, t ∈ {hour, day, week, month, ever}
Normalizing USR_EDITS_EVER by USR_AGE
Editor reputation capturing vandalism tendencies [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
          ] (EN only)
Reputation for editor’s geo-located country of origin [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
          ] (EN only)
Whether the editor has ever been caught vandalizing [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
          ] (EN only)
Time, in seconds, since editor last vandalized [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
          ] (EN only)
Time, in seconds, since the edited article was created
Article revisions in last, t ∈ {hour, day, week, month, ever}
Normalizing ART_EDITS_EVER by ART_AGE
Size, in bytes, of article after the edit under inspection was made
Difference in article size, in bytes, as a result of the edit
Quantity of characters added or removed by edit
Quantity of non-adjacent text blocks modified by edit
Article reputation, capturing vandalism tendencies [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
          ] (EN only)
Time-of-day at which edit was committed (UTC locale)
Day-of-week on which edit was committed (UTC locale)
Length, in characters, of the “revision comment” left with the edit
Whether the comment indicates the edit was “section-specific”
Length, in chars., of the comment w/o auto-added section header
Whether the comment is one typical of vandalism removal
WikiTrust [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          ] score w/o ex post facto evidence (DE, EN only)
Time, in seconds, since the article was last revised
Whether the previous editor of the article was IP/anonymous
Whether the previous article editor is same as current editor
Size, in chars., of longest single-character repetition added by edit
Percent of text added which is in upper-case font
Percent of text added which is alphabetic (vs. numeric/symbolic)
Size, in chars., of longest added token (per word boundaries)
        </p>
        <p>
          Measure of the addition/removal of wiki syntax/markup
More novel is the utilization of ex post facto data in the classification task. To the
best of our knowledge, only the WikiTrust system of Adler et al. [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref2">1,2</xref>
          ] has previously
described features of this type. Tab. 2 lists the ex post facto signals implemented in our
approach, which includes our own novel contributions (the first 4 features), as well as
those proposed and calculated by Adler et al. (the remainder).
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-2">
        <title>EX POST FEAT. DESCRIPTION</title>
        <p>USR_BLK_EVER
USR_PG_SZ_DELT</p>
        <p>ART_DIVERSITY</p>
        <p>HASH_REVERT</p>
        <p>WIKITRUST</p>
        <p>WT_DELAY_DELT
NEXT_TIME_AHEAD</p>
        <p>NEXT_USR_IP</p>
        <p>NEXT_USR_SAME
NEXT_COMM_VAND</p>
        <p>
          Whether the editor has ever been blocked on the wiki
Size change of “user talk” page between edit time and +1 hour
Percentage of recent revisions (±10 edits) made by editor
Whether article content hash-codes indicate edit was reverted
WikiTrust [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          ] score with ex-post-facto evidence (DE, EN only)
Difference in WIKITRUST and WT_NO_DELAY (DE, EN only)
Time, in seconds, until article was next revised
Whether the next editor of the article is an IP/anonymous editor
Whether the next article editor is same as current editor
        </p>
        <p>Whether the next “comment” indicates vandalism removal</p>
        <p>No doubt, the strongest of these features is the WikiTrust score (WIKITRUST).
This captures the notion of reputation-weighted content-persistence: text that survives
is trustworthy, especially when the subsequent editors have good reputations. The
WikiTrust values we obtain are from a lower-order classifier, encompassing ≈70 data points.</p>
        <p>However, it may be possible to improve upon or supplement the WikiTrust score.
First, WikiTrust is computationally intense, having to track word-level histories.
Second, content is sometimes removed or re-authored for reasons other than malicious
intent. Third, WikiTrust is not presently enabled for all languages. This motivated our
creation of feature HASH_REVERT, a more efficient and coarse-grained measure. The
hash-code is computed for the article version prior-to, and immediately-after, the edit
under inspection (scope is expanded if the editor makes multiple consecutive edits). If
the hashes match it indicates an identity revert, the wholesale removal of the editor’s
contributions, which is highly indicative of vandalism.</p>
        <p>
          Another novel feature, USR_PG_SZ_DELT, captures that poor contributors are
often notified/warned of their transgressions on their “talk page”. Informal analysis
suggested that German and Spanish versions lack the standardized warning system that
English employs [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
          ]. Thus, a generic “size change” feature was implemented to detect
such talk page contributions.
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-3">
        <title>2.3 On Language-Driven Features</title>
        <p>When talking about language features, realize that is possible to produce
languagedriven features that are not language-specific (i.e., generic properties). Examples
include our features of the form LANG_*, as found at the bottom of Tab. 1. These
measures are certainly applicable to the languages used herein (German, English, Spanish)
and analogues likely exist in many languages. However, these properties are unlikely
to be universal in nature. In particular, different character sets (e.g., Hindi, Chinese,
Japanese) might prove problematic, but this is ultimately outside the authors’ range of
expertise. It should be noted that languages similar to those under evaluation (i.e., use of
Latin characters, letter casing, space-delimited words, and Arabic numerals) represent
a significant portion of Wikipedia’s article space3.
3 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias_by_language_group</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-4">
        <title>LANG-SPEC. FEAT. DESCRIPTION</title>
        <p>{DE,EN,ES}_OFFEND</p>
        <p>*_OFFEND_IMPACT
{DE,EN,ES}_PRONOUN
*_PRONOUN_IMPACT</p>
        <p>Quantity of offensive terms added/removed by edit
Normalizing *_OFFEND by ART_SIZE_DELT
Quantity of 1st-person pronouns added/removed</p>
        <p>Normalizing *_PRONOUN by ART_SIZE_DELT</p>
        <p>
          While generic language features are portable, they lack the intuition of
languagespecific ones. After all, profanity and slang have little place in encyclopedic content.
Not only are such measures intuitive, they are effective, as the 2010 PAN-CLEF
winning approach of Velasco [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ] used multiple dictionaries (profanity, sexual terms,
biased words, etc.). This is disheartening as such features: (1) lack portability, (2) can be
evaded with obfuscation, (3) require time-consuming implementation by fluent
speakers, and (4) tend to be computationally expensive. Velasco, however, did not include
many of the language-independent features we present in Tab. 1. Thus, as [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
          ]
suggested, language-independent features might overlap and render language-specific ones
less critical. We extend that analysis here and do so across multiple natural languages.
        </p>
        <p>Unfortunately, Velasco’s dictionaries are not open source and the German and
Spanish equivalents must be implemented. Not NLP experts ourselves, we intend only to
create proof-of-concept and non-exhaustive language-specific features, as per Tab. 3.
This also allows us to perform cost-benefit analysis (i.e., the coverage of dictionaries
vs. the performance improvement) and motivates our decision to encode three different
approaches to compiling the offensive word lists (“offensive” here is just the
combination of all undesirable text categories):
– SPANISH (ES): We re-purposed a scoring list designed for Spanish Wikipedia use4.</p>
        <p>The list contains 800+ manually constructed regexps of extensive complexity
(capturing intra-word permutations of diacritics, case, repeated letters, etc.). Manual
inspection removed regexps not specific to offensive terminology.
– ENGLISH (EN): A generic list of 1300+ offensive words (not regexps) is utilized5.</p>
        <p>The list is not Wikipedia-specific, but does enumerate conjugated verb forms.
– GERMAN (DE): Unable to locate a dictionary of sufficient breadth, we decided to
examine the feasibility of a programmatic approach. We took the union of
informal profanity lists and ran a stemming algorithm to produce roots which could be
searched for as embedded (i.e., non word-boundary delimited) regexp matches.</p>
        <p>The text added and removed by an edit is scanned for word/regexp matches. The
number of matches are quantified (+1 for additions, -1 for removals) and these form the
{DE,EN,ES}_OFFEND features. The first-person “pronoun” features are
straightforward and intend to capture bias in authorship and possible non-neutral points-of-view.
4 http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:AVBOT/Lista_del_bien_y_del_mal
5 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/resources/</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-5">
        <title>ENGLISH FEATURE # . . . FEATURE . . . # . . . FEATURE . . . #</title>
        <p>WIKITRUST (F) 1 ART_SIZE_DELT 21 USR_LAST_RB 41
WT_DELAY_DELT (F) 2 USR_PG_SIZE 22 COMM_HAS_SEC 42</p>
        <p>WT_NO_DELAY 3 ART_REP 23 ART_CHURN_CHARS 43
HASH_REVERT (F) 4 USR_PG_WARNS 24 COMM_IND_VAND 44
NEXT_COMM_VAND (F) 5 LANG_MARKUP 25 ART_CHURN_BLKS 45
USR_EDITS_MONTH 6 LANG_LONG_TOK 26 ART_EDITS_WEEK 46
USR_EDITS_WEEK 7 LANG_UCASE 27 ART_SIZE 47
USR_EDITS_EVER 8 EN_PRONOUN_IMPCT 28 ART_EDITS_DAY 48
USR_COUNTRY_REP 9 ART_EDITS_TOTAL 29 TIME_DOW 49
USR_EDITS_DENSE 10 USR_REP 30 ART_EDITS_HOUR 50</p>
        <p>USR_IS_IP 11 ART_AGE 31 NEXT_USR_SAME (F) 51
USR_EDITS_DAY 12 LANG_ALPHA 32 USR_HAS_RB 52
USR_PG_SZ_DELT (F) 13 LANG_MARKUP 33 PREV_USR_IP 53
NEXT_TIME_AHEAD (F) 14 EN_PRONOUN 34 USR_BLK_EVER (F) 54</p>
        <p>USR_AGE 15 ART_EDITS_DENSE 35 USR_BLK_BEFORE 55
COMM_LEN_NO_SEC 16 ART_DIVERSITY (F) 36 USR_IS_BOT 56
EN_OFFEND_IMPACT 17 LANG_CHAR_REP 37 NEXT_USR_IP (F) 57
USR_EDITS_HOUR 18 PREV_USR_SAME 38 TIME_TOD 58
EN_OFFEND 19 PREV_TIME_AGO 39</p>
        <p>COMM_LEN 20 ART_EDITS_MONTH 40</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3 Evaluation</title>
      <p>This section describes and evaluates the machine-learning model built atop our feature
set. We begin by describing our choice of classification algorithm (Sec. 3.1). Then,
this model is used to evaluate feature effectiveness over the labeled training set, paying
particular attention to novel subsets (Sec. 3.2). Finally, we summarize performance over
the PAN-CLEF 2011 competition test set (Sec. 3.3).</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>3.1 Classification Model</title>
        <p>
          The Weka [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
          ] implementation of the alternating decision tree algorithm (ADTree) is
used for scoring/classification. This method was chosen because it: (1) produces
humanreadable models, (2) handles missing features (API failures, missing data, etc.), and
(3) supports enumerated features (our strategy has many booleans). ADTrees have one
parameter of interest: the quantity of “boosting iterations” (i.e., tree-depth). German
and Spanish classifiers utilize 18 iterations and English uses 30, quantities arrived at
via cross-validation (the English training corpus [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
          ] is 32× the size of the other two).
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>3.2 Training Set Evaluation</title>
        <p>
          All results are produced via 10-fold cross-validation over the training corpus [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
          ]. The
labels of the test corpus were withheld for the competition, as discussed in Sec. 3.3.
(a)
(b)
#
WT_NO_DELAY
USR_EDITS_MONTH
USR_EDITS_WEEK
USR_EDITS_EVER
USR_COUNTRY_REP
USR_EDITS_MONTH
USR_EDITS_WEEK
USR_EDITS_EVER
USR_IS_IP
ES_OFFEND_IMPACT
1 NEXT_COMM_VAND (F) WIKITRUST (F) NEXT_COMM_VAND (F)
2 WIKITRUST (F) WT_DELAY_DELT (F) NEXT_TIME_AHEAD (F)
3 WT_NO_DELAY WT_NO_DELAY HASH_REVERT (F)
4 HASH_REVERT (F) HASH_REVERT (F) USR_PG_SZ_DELT (F)
5 NEXT_USR_IP (F) NEXT_COMM_VAND (F) USR_EDITS_MONTH
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-3">
        <title>Core Features and Cross-Language Consistency: We begin with the “core” set of</title>
        <p>features (Tab. 1). Though these have been described in the past, their cross-language
evaluation is novel. Although space considerations prevent showing the full
featureranking for all languages (Tab. 5a), they are remarkably similar to those presented for
English (Tab. 4, ignoring “(F)” entries), especially when binned by the info-gain metric.
That is, a feature tends to be equally effective no matter the language of evaluation.</p>
        <p>It is unsurprising that the zero-delay WikiTrust feature (WT_NO_DELAY) is the
topperforming feature where available (English, German) – it is a lower-order classifier that
wraps many data points. Beyond that, user participation statistics and registration status
are also dominant. Generic language features tend to perform moderately (not all edits
add content), with article-driven signals tending towards the bottom of the rankings.</p>
        <p>While the feature ranking is not unexpected, the cross-language consistency has
stronger implications. It is a sociologically interesting observation that misbehavior is
characterized similarly across language and cultural boundaries. More technically, it
suggests the creation of language-independent classifiers might be feasible, eliminating
the need for new corpora to be amassed for each new Wikipedia edition.
Ex Post Facto Inclusion: As Tab. 5b demonstrates, the inclusion of ex post facto
features dramatically modifies the list of “best features,” with 4 of the top 5 being
of this type for all languages. Such signals also positively affect overall performance,
varying between 3.6% (English) and 13.6% (Spanish) PR-AUC increase (see Tab. 6).
While these improvements are not overwhelming, it should be emphasized that the
highaccuracy of zero-delay approaches decreases the possible margin for improvement.</p>
        <p>
          These ex post facto features are redundant, however, all trying to capture the same
notion: “was the edit reverted?” (particularly WIKITRUST, NEXT_COMM_VAND, and
HASH_REVERT). While all are features of exemplary performance, they vary in
efficiency and robustness. For example, WikiTrust employs a complex but secure algorithm
that mines reputation from implicit Wikipedia actions. In contrast, NEXT_COMM_VAND
parses explicit summaries for keywords, which while simple, could easily be gamed.
The degree to which secure features are required is not immediately apparent. Vandals
are typically poorly incentivized [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
          ] and therefore may not evade crude protections.
0.302
0.500
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-4">
        <title>GERMAN ZD</title>
        <p>Cost vs. Benefits of Language-Specific Signals: As Tab. 7 shows, the performance
benefit of language-specific features varies dramatically. They prove most helpful when
targeting zero-delay detection, and the extensiveness and expertise involved in creating
the “offensive word list” correlates with performance gains. Recall from Sec. 2.3 that
our German approach was quite crude (a stemming algorithm over informal profanity
lists). Such attempts did not translate positively, adding only noise to the classifier. At
the other extreme, a third-party, Wikipedia-customized, and complex set of
regularexpressions was able to increase zero-delay PR-AUC by nearly 8% in the Spanish case.</p>
        <p>
          Where infrastructure already exists for these purposes, it can and should be
reutilized (as we did for English and Spanish). Where it does not, it would seem casual
attempts should be avoided. More broadly, it seems wise to investigate autonomous
(and language-independent) means to produce robust dictionaries (e.g., n-grams).
Cumulative Performance: A broader viewer of classifier performance is presented
numerically in Tab. 6 and visualized in Fig. 1. One interesting observation is the
varying performance between languages. English, despite having the most enabled features,
and 32× more training examples, is classified much poorer than Spanish and German.
At current, we have two hypotheses why this is the case. First, English has a tool called
the “Edit Filter” which prevents trivial vandalism from being saved6 (and becoming a
corpus member). We are unaware of any German/Spanish equivalent, meaning obvious
vandalism (i.e., “low-hanging fruit”) would be corpus members in those cases.
Second, vandalism tagging is a subjective process. The labeling of the English corpus was
done via Amazon Mechanical Turk [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
          ] (utilizing random persons), whereas the smaller
German/Spanish versions involved Wikipedia researchers. The latter group is likely to
be more consistent in upholding the standards of the Wikipedia community, and such
agreement is particularly important for features like NEXT_COMM_VAND.
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_Filter
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        </p>
        <p>
          Regardless, English-language performance (the only known baseline) is comparable
to the state-of-the-art. That benchmark was set in our prior work [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
          ], which this writing
re-implements with slight modifications. It should be emphasized that it was not our
intention to best that prior work, rather, we sought to use the expanded PAN-CLEF
2011 rules/corpora to analyze novel portions of the problem space.
        </p>
        <p>Finally, it is interesting to produce the most effective feature subsets for each
language (Tab. 8). Unlike Tab. 5, this list considers feature correlation and overlap;
displaying the features weighted most heavily in the actual ADTree models. These
orderings are quite unique compared to Tabs. 4 &amp; 5, and greater analysis is needed to
determine what correlations give rise to these rule chains. For instance, English feature
LANG_MARKUP ranked 25th in info-gain, yet was the 3rd highest ranking in subset
form. Results like these imply a large degree of overlap between features, suggesting
that small (and therefore, efficient) feature sets/trees can produce accurate results.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-5">
        <title>3.3 Test Set Performance</title>
        <p>When applied to the label-withheld test set, our model won the 2011 PAN-CLEF
competition. The PR-AUCs (EN= 0.706, EN= 0.822, ES= 0.489) show a slight
performance increase for English, but a dramatic drop for German/Spanish relative to
crossvalidation over training data (Tab. 6). When the test corpus labels are revealed, they
should be inspected to see if some type of systematic bias gave rise to this discrepancy.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Conclusions</title>
      <p>Our novel research directions in this paper were motivated by changes in the 2011
PAN-CLEF competition with respect to both the 2010 edition and the bulk of
existing Wikipedia vandalism research. First, the competition permitted features to leverage
evidence after the edits were made. We identified multiple metrics of this type, which
were extremely effective, and whose implementation made clear the trade-off between
feature efficiency and robustness.</p>
      <p>Second, the competition spanned three natural languages. For language-independent
features (i.e., metadata) this was the first non-English evaluation of such signals, though
relative order was found to be surprisingly consistent across languages. Multiple
languages, however, imply costly localization for language-specific features (e.g., profanity
lists), forcing examination of their effectiveness. Including these atop an extensive set
of language-independent features, we find that minor-to-moderate contributions are still
possible, and the degree of improvement correlates with the localization’s complexity.</p>
      <p>We hope that this work continues to promote and improve the autonomous detection
of vandalism. Such progress frees editors of monitoring roles and allows them to better
contribute to a growing body of collaborative knowledge.</p>
      <p>
        Acknowledgements: This research was supported in part by ONR MURI N00014-07-1-0907.
The authors recognize those colleagues whose techniques were a component in the described
approach: B. Thomas Adler, Luca de Alfaro, Santiago Mola-Velasco, Sampath Kannan, Ian Pye,
and Paolo Rosso (see [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ]). Andreas Haeberlen is thanked for his German language assistance.
Martin Potthast is acknowledged for his continued dedication to the vandalism detection task.
      </p>
    </sec>
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