| dc.description.abstract | Computational risk detection holds promise for shielding particularly vulnerable groups from online harm. A thorough literature review on real-time computational risk detection methods revealed that most research defined 'real-time' as approaches that analyze content retrospectively as early as possible or as preventive approaches to prevent risks from reaching online environments. This review provided a research agenda to advance the field, highlighting key areas: employing ecologically valid datasets, basing models and features on human understanding, developing responsive models, and evaluating model performance through detection timing and human assessment. This dissertation embraces human-centric methods for both gaining empirical insights into young people's risk experiences online and developing a real-time risk detection system using a dataset of youth social media. By analyzing adolescent posts on an online peer support mental health forum through a mixed-methods approach, it was discovered that online risks faced by youth could be laden by other factors, like mental health issues, suggesting a multidimensional nature of these risks. Leveraging these insights, a statistical model was used to create profiles of youth based on their reported online and offline risks, which were then mapped with their actual online discussions. This empirical study uncovered that approximately 20% of youth fall into the highest risk category, necessitating immediate intervention. Building on this critical finding, the third study of this dissertation introduced a novel algorithmic framework aimed at the 'timely' identification of high-risk situations in youth online interactions. This framework prioritizes the riskiest interactions for high-risk evaluation, rather than uniformly assessing all youth discussions. A notable aspect of this study is the application of reinforcement learning for prioritizing conversations that need urgent attention. This innovative method uses decision-making processes to flag conversations as high or low priority. After training several deep learning models, the study identified Bi-Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) networks as the most effective for categorizing conversation priority. The Bi-LSTM model's capability to retain information over long durations is crucial for ongoing online risk monitoring. This dissertation sheds light on crucial factors that enhance the capability to detect risks in real time within private conversations among youth. | |
