Abstract: Online propaganda is central to the recruitment strategies of extremist groups and in recent years these efforts have increasingly extended to women. To investigate ISIS' approach to targeting women in their online propaganda and uncover implications for counterterrorism, we rely on text mining and natural language processing (NLP). Specifically, we extract articles published in Dabiq and Rumiyah (ISIS's online English language publications) to identify prominent topics. To identify similarities or differences between these texts and those produced by non-violent religious groups, we extend the analysis to articles from a Catholic forum dedicated to women. We also perform an emotional analysis of both of these resources to better understand the emotional components of propaganda. We rely on Depechemood (a lexical-base emotion analysis method) to detect emotions most likely to be evoked in readers of these materials. The findings indicate that the emotional appeal of ISIS and Catholic materials are similar

Introduction: Since its rise in 2013, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has utilized the Internet to spread its ideology, radicalize individuals, and recruit them to their cause. In comparison to other Islamic extremist groups, ISIS' use of technology was more sophisticated, voluminous, and targeted. For example, during ISIS' advance toward Mosul, ISIS related accounts tweeted some 40,000 tweets in one day BIBREF0.However, this heavy engagement forced social media platforms to institute policies to prevent unchecked dissemination of terrorist propaganda to their users, forcing ISIS to adapt to other means to reach their target audience. One such approach was the publication of online magazines in different languages including English. Although discontinued now, these online resources provided a window into ISIS ideology, recruitment, and how they wanted the world to perceive them. For example, after predominantly recruiting men, ISIS began to also include articles in their magazines that specifically addressed women. ISIS encouraged women to join the group by either traveling to the caliphate or by carrying out domestic attacks on behalf of ISIS in their respective countries. This tactical change concerned both practitioners and researchers in the counterterrorism community. New advancements in data science can shed light on exactly how the targeting of women in extremist propaganda works and whether it differs significantly from mainstream religious rhetoric. We utilize natural language processing methods to answer three questions: What are the main topics in women-related articles in ISIS' online magazines? What similarities and/or differences do these topics have with non-violent, non-Islamic religious material addressed specifically to women? What kind of emotions do these articles evoke in their readers and are there similarities in the emotions evoked from both ISIS and non-violent religious materials? As these questions suggest, to understand what, if anything, makes extremist appeals distinctive, we need a point of comparison in terms of the outreach efforts to women from a mainstream, non-violent religious group. For this purpose, we rely on an online Catholic women's forum. Comparison between Catholic material and the content of ISIS' online magazines allows for novel insight into the distinctiveness of extremist rhetoric when targeted towards the female population. To accomplish this task, we employ topic modeling and an unsupervised emotion detection method. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in Section SECREF2, we review related works on ISIS propaganda and applications of natural language methods. Section SECREF3 describes data collection and pre-processing. Section SECREF4 describes in detail the approach. Section SECREF5 reports the results, and finally, Section SECREF6 presents the conclusion.

Question: What conclusions do the authors draw from their finding that the emotional appeal of ISIS and Catholic materials are similar?
Answer: By comparing scores for each word calculated using Depechemood dictionary and normalize emotional score for each article, they found Catholic and ISIS materials show similar scores