Survey on Spam Filtering in Text Analysis
Saksham Sharma, Rabi Raj Yadav
Computer Science Engineering, Vellore Institute of University
saksham.sharma2016@vitstudent.ac.in
rabiraj.yadav2017@vitstudent.ac.in
Abstract: The Internet rose as an amazing framework for the
overall communication and collaboration of individuals. The
misuse of this innovation by fraudster (for example spam or
viruses) created difficulties in the improvement of systems to
ensure a reasonable and secure experience communication. Data
is being exploited by individuals and organisations to gain
competitive advantage, a substantial amount of data is being
generated by spam or fake users. Subsequently, attackers focus
on increasingly solid assault vectors like email: unfortunate
casualties are contaminated utilizing either malicious connections
or connections prompting malicious sites like in social media
websites Facebook & twitter posts and Gmail emails. In this
manner proficient filtering and blocking strategies for spam
messages are required. Sadly, most spam filtering arrangements
proposed so far are responsive, they require a lot of both ham and
spam messages to effectively produce principles to separate
between both. In this survey paper, we studied a progressively
proactive methodology that enables us to legitimately gather
spam message. We will see how spam text is getting increase in
emails, social media fake posts, twitter, url etc. We can watch
current spam runs and get a duplicate of most recent spam
messages in a quick and proficient way. In light of the gathered
information, we can produce layouts that speak to a compact
outline of a spam run. The gathered information would then be
able to be utilized to improve current spam filtering methods and
grow new scenes to productively channel sends.
Keywords: Text Analysis, Spam Filters, Spam Controlling
Algorithms, Naive Bayes, Classifier.
I. INTRODUCTION
Electronic mail (email) is critical for group connection, which
has turned out to be generally utilized by numerous
individuals’ people and associations. Simultaneously, email is
one of the quick rising and expensive issues connected with the
web today, in which case it is called spam email. The first spam
email was sent on May 1, 1978 to many users on ARPANET.
It was an advertisement for a presentation by Digital
Equipment Corporation their DECSYSTEM-20 products sent
by Gary Thuerk, a marketer of theirs[7].Email spam has
steadily grown since then by 2019 it is estimated that spam
messages accounted for 56 percent of email traffic[8]. Spam
Filtering is a process of detecting spam text, spontaneous and
undesirable emails and avoid those messages from getting to a
client's inbox. Basically it is a software routine that removes
approaching spam or redirects it to a "garbage" letter box (see
spam organizer). Likewise called "spam blockers," spam
channels are incorporated with a client's email program. They
are additionally incorporated with or included onto a mail
server, where case the spam never arrives at the client's or
user’s mailbox. So in order to avoid the spam emails, or spam
posts from social media fake posts and other things authors
have purposed various techniques to address the issues of
common problems/issues during spam filtering using the
approach of natural language processing NLP is a branch of
artificial intelligence that deals with the interaction between
computers and humans .The objective of NLP is to read,
interpret, comprehend, and understand the human dialects in a
way that is profitable. These days, proficient spam filtering are
done by utilizing a combination of various classifiers
supported by advanced filter platforms such as Spam Assassin
(The Apache Spam Assassin Project, 2011) or
Wirebrush4SPAM (Wirebrush4SPAM, 2011).A common
filter usually combines three different kinds of techniques: (i)
domain authentication schemes, (ii) collaborative approaches,
(iii) content-based classifiers, (iv) characteristics-based
filters[9].A novel methodology for recognizing spam versus
non-spam online networking posts and offers more knowledge
into the behaviour of spam users on Twitter. The methodology
proposes an optimized set of features independent of recorded
tweets, which are available for a brief timeframe on Twitter.
Applying proper algorithms to the filters like Naive Bayes,
SMO, do data collection and data pre-processing.[1]
II. PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
The most common problems that we have seen in each
paper is the problem in spam filters. Misclassifying a
legitimate e-mail to be spam by a spam filter is generally
more destructive than misclassifying a spam e-emails to be
legitimate.[2]
Online spamming activities come in different structures,
for example, malware dissemination, posting of
commercial URLs, fake news or abusive contents,
automated generation of large volume of contents and
following or mentioning irregular users.[1] Spam filters are
profoundly looked for to naturally filter spam to clean
mailboxes. Starting spam filters require a user to create
regulations principally by taking a gander at patterns in a
run of the mill garbage email, for example, the presence of
specific words, blends of words, phrases. So in order to
tackle this problem the authors have proposed a hybrid
SMS classification system to detect spam or ham, using the
Naive Bayes algorithm[3] and A priori algorithm. Also
using social media Spammers utilize URLs in the tweets to
 divert the clients to pernicious destinations which contain
infection in those locales. They likewise use URLs for
phishing and get the individual subtleties of the clients.
III. CRITICAL ANALYSIS
In this paper[1] the solution is to address the issue of uneven
class dissemination, author has propose a novel term frequency
difference and category proportion based feature selection
work, named as TFDCR, for generating features with solid
separating capacity from the preparing information. Author
used the incremental learning model utilizing Support Vector
Machines (SVM) so that the learned decision model is updated
to modify the modified dissemination of information in the
presence of floating concepts. Due to a frequent change in the
content of e-mails, the relevance of the representative features
likewise varies over a period.[4] He propose a novel
selectionRankWeight heuristic capacity based on the feature's
category proportion difference to identify new features from an
approaching set of e-mails. The existing feature set is updated
by including these newly selected features before actuating
incremental preparing of the classifier.
Architecture:
Working:
Proposed Algorithms-
Feature selection using the novel TFDCR function.
- This algorithm demonstrates the method for TFDCR feature
selection work.
Incremental personalized e-mail spam filter with dynamic
feature update.
- This algorithm describes the proposed system for incremental
personalized e-mail spam filtering with dynamic feature
update work.
The main experiment is performed to analyze how effectively
TFDCR feature selection capacity identifies the most
segregating features from the given preparing information. We
used five fundamental and well-known feature selection
capacities to compare the results achieved through proposed
TFDCR. The principal experiment is conducted utilizing a
conventional cluster preparing of classifier followed by a
testing phase.
In the second experiment, we integrate an incremental learning
model utilizing SVM with an updated feature set to relearn the
modified circulation of information[5]. In this experiment, we
use TFDCR feature selection in both the conventional group
learning and the incremental learning models. Features are
updated utilizing a selectionRankWeight heuristic capacity.
The dataset used are: the first dataset is an open ENRON
dataset. This dataset contains pre-processed e-mail messages
with the removal of attachments. And the second dataset used
for filter evaluation is ECML. The ECML task-An and task-B
datasets were made publically available during 2006 ECML-
PKDD Discovery Challenge. [6]
The third dataset considered is PU dataset which contains four
folders PU1, PU2, PU3 and PUA that
Contain e-mails received by particular users.
A novel methodology for recognizing spam versus non-spam
online networking posts and offers more knowledge into
the behaviour of spam users on Twitter. The methodology
proposes an optimized set of features independent of
recorded tweets, which[2] are available for a brief
timeframe on Twitter. We take into record features related
to the users of Twitter, their records and their pairwise
engagement with each other. We experimentally
demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our
methodology and compare it to a run of the mill feature set
for spam detection in the literature, achieving a noteworthy
improvement on performance.[4] As opposed to earlier
research discoveries, we observe that an average automated
spam record posted in any event 12 tweets per day at well-
definedperiods.
Following proposed approaches:
Parameter tuning and classification models
- An effective classifier ought to be able to correctly group
previously unseen information by leveraging the experience
gained from preparing on n labelled samples, i.e. information
instances and the corresponding class.
Feature importance and correlation
- During an underlying investigation stage, a large number of
features have been used for preparing and some features were
discarded due to their relatively low commitment to the overall
performance data.

Tools that are required:
Scikit-learn toolkit and for evaluation, different metrics are
utilized so as to maintain a strategic distance from an
inclination towards the dominant part class, especially when
the dataset is imbalanced.
Honeypot dataset is openly available and useful for examining
spam movement on Twitter. It was utilized both as a dataset
per se and for collecting the SPD datasets utilizing keywords.
SPD datasets to maintain a strategic distance from the potential
danger of a high false positive rate.
Architecture:
In this paper[3] author has proposed a solution in following
ways, basically he used the data mining techniques.
Data Collection: Data were donated by George Foreman, and
the collected information set is used in UCI machine learning
repository.
Data Pre-processing: In the real-world informational
collection, which comprises of numerous mistakes, they are
cleaned and removed so as to have accurate results of the
information sets. In this step informational collection it is
transformed and integrated into an appropriate group before
classifiers are applied in the informational index.
Applying Algorithm: After having the pre-processed file, all
the grouping calculations, namely Naive Bayes, SMO, J48
decision tree, and irregular forest, have applied so as to
discover features based on which spam being identified.
Performance Evaluation: After applying all classifiers, each
of them was evaluated based on performance metrics so as to
figure out the best classifier.
He stated that classification technique as other information
mining techniques like clustering, whereas affiliation isn't
capable of prediction related issues. Clustering is capable of
parcelling the related information elements in same set, and
then again, affiliation is generally used for establishing
relationships between attributes that exists in an informational
index.
Working:
1. Naive Bayes algorithm
2. Apriori algorithm
3. J48 decision tree
4. Random forest Algorithm
The informational collection used in this work is tested and
analyzed with four different classification techniques that use
cross-approval which are the accompanying: (I) Naive Bayes,
(ii) SMO, (iii) J48, (iv) irregular forest. After applying every
one of the classifiers, the performance of each classifier has
been analyzed based on different performance metrics as: true-
positive rate, false-positive rate, precision, recall, F-measure,
ROC area, time taken to fabricate classifier model. [5]
Tools and Technology: For implementing the required errand,
creators have used WEKA device which is an
open-source device for information mining and the classifiers
used in
this work are: (I) Naive Bayes, (ii) SMO, (iii) J48, (iv) irregular
forest.
Architecture:
In this paper[4]r author introduced deep learning models based
on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Five CNNs and one
feature-based model are used in the ensemble.Each CNN uses
different word embeddings (Glove, Word2vec) to train the
model. The feature-based model uses content based, user-
based, and n-gram features.Neural network acts as a meta
classifier.The difference between their proposed method with
existing methods is that they combine both handcrafted
features and word embedding features to capture more
information about spam and non-spam tweets.
Working:
User-Based Features: It checks whether the user profile is
verified or not, finds the length of the user profile description,
checks whether location information is given by the user or not,
counts the number of followers, friends of the user,finds the
reputation score(#followers/(#followers + #friends)),finds the
number of tweets posted and lists that the user has subscribed
to.[1]
Content-Based Features: It finds the number of
words,capitalization words, exclamation and question mark
symbols, URL,hashtags, mentions in the tweet.
Tools that are required:
They used HSpam and 1KS10KN dataset.Along with feature
model they used four methods (CNN + Twitter Glove, CNN
+Google news, CNN+Edinburgh, CNN+H Spam).They used
accuracy, precision, and F-Measure for word embeddings as
parameter to compare.
In this paper[5] author introduces a feature selection technique
for a spam-filtering domain that takes advantage of semantic
information.They group word based features into semantic
topics to generate feature vectors.They involves the execution
of three feature selection methods.Information Gain, Latent
Dirichlet Allocation, and Semantic-based Feature Selection.
Working:
They discussed basic four methods:
i) content-based filtering: a set of methods able to perform a
detailed analysis of message content (text, image/s, attached
documents) to determine a class for the message.
(ii) collaborative schemes: sharing detailed information about
received spam messages
(iii) domain authorization methods: to define trust servers
(identified by their IP addresses) to send messages for a certain
domain
(iv) characteristics-based filters: the number of recipients
receiving the same e-mail.
Topic guessing methodology: They used noun semantic
relation included in Wordnet to design it:
(i) hyponym (X is a kind of Y)
(ii) hypernym (X includes the notion of Y among others)
(iii) meronym (X is a part of Y)
(iv) holonym (X contains Y among others).
They find e-mail topics, by selecting a hierarchical level (h)
in order to semantically group terms (synsets) into more
generic topics. A topic is present in a message if it contains a
term t belonging to one of the representative synsets for the
topic.
.
Tools that are required:
They have used WordNet Lexical Database. The hierarchical
WordNet database groups words into synset.
In this paper[6] author mainly focuses to increase the accuracy
of the existing Naive Bayes Spam Filter. This algorithm will
work on text modification and which cause hindrance in
classification of email. Common Spam senders are able to
bypass spam detectors by using leetspeak and diacritics.
Leetspeak is an alternative alphabet that is primarily used on
the Ìnternet. Diacritics are the accents placed on words to
modify the appearance. Leetspeak allows the spam senders to
change letters into symbols or a series of symbols. For
example,”A” can be written as ”/-\”. When a word is modified
using leetspeak, spam detectors are not able to identify the
email as spam, which creates a false positive.
Bayesian poisoning is a technique used by e mail spammers to
attempt to degrade the effectiveness of spam filters that rely on
Bayesian spam filtering.
Working:
They first applied pre-processing technique to remove the issue
of diacritic and leetspeak.In python isalpha() function is used
with below algorithm:
If a = leetspeak: then replace(a, c)
If b = diacritcs: then replace(b, c)
After this they applied multinomial Naive Bayes algorithm
along with different machine learning algorithm.
Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB) is the probability of the
words (tk), within a message d given a class of the message,
spam or ham. It assumes that the message is a bag of tokens or
words, such that the order of the tokens is irrelevant.
Multinomial Naive Bayes essentially counts the relative
occurrences of a particular token within the message to
determine the conditional probability.
P(c|d) = P(c)*Product( 1≤k≥nd P(tk|c))
Tools that are required:
They have used Spam Server Spam assassin for the datasets.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This study critically analyses the different approach in
different paper ranging from basic text pre-processing, through
using naive bases classifier, leading to the advance concept of
neural network and feature selection. While studying through
all paper we found that naive Bayes classification is the oldest
approach.[4] After that the trend of feature selection came into
highlights. At this present age of machine learning and deep
learning, one paper introduced the concept of applying neural
network. Different paper have used different datasets and for
evaluation metrics they have used different approach like
precision, recall and confusion matrix. The confusion matrix
(i)false positive errors (FP, legitimate messages classified as
spam) (ii) false negative errors (FN,undetected spam e-mails)
(iii) true positive hits (TP, number of spam messages detected)
and (iv) true negative hits (TN, number of legitimate messages
correctly classified).[2]
Although work and research done by above prominent authors
seem promising, new further progressing work can be done.
Among all the above paper Topic Guessing models is able to
achieve the best results when compared with other alternative.
The improvement can be done to decrease the obfuscation(the
destruction of the intended meaning of communication by
making the message difficult to understand).It will help in
precise guessing of topic to classify it as ham or spam email.
Further this work can be continued to spam detection of image
and video content as instaspam as the world is growing into
digital market. [5]

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