Social Robot Detection Using RoBERTa Classifier and Random Forest Regressor with Similarity Analysis

Abstract

Twitter has skyrocketed over the past few years and has become a major social media platform. At the same time, the number of social robots on Twitter has also increased significantly. These bot accounts imitate the speeches of normal users to manipulate public opinions, affect the normal communication of users. Therefore, bot account detection came into being. Despite extensive research efforts, bots on Twitter are still evolving to evade detection. Most of the current bot detection methods have a single structure and cannot detect and identify different types of bot accounts well. In this paper, we propose a new system for social robot detection that uses a RoBERTa (Robustly Optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Pretraining Approach) classifier and a random forest regressor with similarity analysis. In particular, the system considers the similarity of tweets and uses a voting system in addition to a set of features extracted from the user profile information and the tweets themselves. We conduct experiments using the largest dataset of bots available and show that the accuracy of our system is up to 0.8588, which is higher than that of all the other baseline methods.