Twitter Bot Detection Using Neural Networks and Linguistic Embeddings

Twitter is a web application playing the dual role of online social networking and microblogging. The popularity and open structure of Twitter have attracted a large number of automated programs, known as bots. In this article, we propose a Twitter bot detection model using recurrent neural networks, specifically bidirectional lightweight gated recurrent unit (BiLGRU), and linguistic embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, our Twitter bot detection model is the first that does not require any handcrafted features, or prior knowledge or assumptions about account profiles, friendship networks or historical behavior. The proposed model uses only textual content of tweets and linguistic embeddings to classify bot and human accounts on Twitter. Experimental results show that the proposed model performs better or comparably to state-of-the-art Twitter bot detection models while requiring no feature engineering, making it faster and easier to train and deploy in a real network. We also present experimental results that show the performance and computational costs of different types of linguistic embeddings and recurrence network variants for the task of Twitter bot detection. The results will potentially help researchers design high-performance deep-learning models for similar tasks.