Deep learning to filter SMS spam

The popularity of short message service (SMS) has been growing over the last decade. For businesses, these text messages are more effective than even emails. This is because while 98% of mobile users read their SMS by the end of the day, about 80% of the emails remain unopened. The popularity of SMS has also given rise to SMS Spam, which refers to any irrelevant text messages delivered using mobile networks. They are severely annoying to users. Most existing research that has attempted to filter SMS Spam has relied on manually identified features. Extending the current literature, this paper uses deep learning to classify Spam and Not-Spam text messages. Specifically, Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short-term memory models were employed. The proposed models were based on text data only, and self-extracted the feature set. On a benchmark dataset consisting of 747 Spam and 4,827 Not-Spam text messages, a remarkable accuracy of 99.44% was achieved.