Semantic Tools for Forensics: Towards Finding Evidence in Short Messages

摘要

Mobile devices are a popular means for planning, appointing and conducting criminal offences. In particular, short messages (SMS) and chats often contain evidential information. Due to the terms of their use, these types of messages are fundamentally different from other forms of written communication in terms of their grammatical and syntactic structure. Due to the low price of media storage, messages are rarely deleted. On one hand, this fact is quite positive as possible evidential information is not lost. On the other hand, considering only SMSs, 15,000 and more on only one cell phone is not uncommon. In the most cases of organized or gang crime, there is not one but many devices in use. Analysing this huge amount of messages manually is time consuming and therefore not economically justifiable in the cases of small and medium crimes. In this work, we propose a process chain that enables to decrease the analysis and evaluation time dramatically by reducing the messages which need to be examined manually.