Comparing machine learning models with a focus on tone in grooming chat logs

In online spaces, children are vulnerable to exploitation and sexual predators. Groomers contact minors in online chat rooms with the intent of sexual abuse. This study investigates how new deep learning models compare to traditional machine learning models in detecting grooming conversations and predatory authors. Furthermore, we detect the underlying tones used by predators and explore how these affect detection capabilities. Our goal is to better understand predator tactics and to advance automatic grooming detection in order to protect children in online spaces. The PAN12 chat logs, which contain grooming chat conversations, were used as the dataset for the research. These chat conversations were sorted into sentiments through the DistilBERT classifier based on the predator tone. SVMs and the LLaMA 3.2 1B large language model by Meta were then trained and fine-tuned on the different sentiments. The results measured through precision, recall and $F_1$ score show that the large language model performs better in grooming detection than traditional machine learning. Moreover, performance differences between the positive and negative sentiment are captured and indicate that positive tone improves detection while negative toned grooming conversations have nuanced patterns that are harder to distinguish from non-grooming. This shows that groomers employ varying strategies to gain access to their victims. Lastly, with an $F_1$ score of 0.99 and an $F_{0.5}$ score of 0.99, the LLaMA 3.2 1B model outperforms both traditional machine learning, as well as previous versions of the large language model in grooming author detection.