Questions on the "Spam the Spammers" Problem about requests-for-research HOT 3 CLOSED

cc/ @wojzaremba (author of that problem!)

from requests-for-research.

@tra38
Thank you for your comment. Most of points you made are extremely valid.

1. Spammers need to communicate a given, specific message. It's difficult to generate large amount of text that is fully coherent, and which would convey spammer's advertisement. This problem is extremely difficult, and is close in complexity to building a full fetched dialog system.

However, it's easy to generate meaningless messages that at first look reasonable. That's what language models do. It's hard to automatically detect such messages, because they match distribution of real emails (you can even use adversarial networks to generate such emails).

1. I believe that techniques that really on
2. data
3. statistical machine learning
   are the way to defeat spammers, rather than to hit them once. Solution that is hard coded has to be constantly updated, because spammers will automatically filter such emails. Only emails that cannot be easily recognized will require their labour, and can lead to the final defeat. That would mean that email has to have all signs of being original:
4. text
5. message
6. email address
7. ip address of a server

from requests-for-research.

@wojzaremba, thanks for your reply. Knowing that the goal is to produce an email with apparent sophistication rather than one that is fully coherent, I can better understand what you're aiming for. Using adversarial networks could probably work in that regard (though trying to apply them to text seems like a difficult problem in and of itself).

I assume that since you have retracted the Request for Research (due to its complexity and reliance on other fields), that this proposal is dead in the water. But I suppose it's still useful to think about what is already possible with current technologies.

from requests-for-research.