MATCHED: Multimodal Authorship-Attribution To Combat Human Trafficking in Escort-Advertisement Data

It comprises 27,619 unique text descriptions and 55,115 images (in jpg format) sourced from Backpage escort ads across seven major U.S. cities–Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Chicago, San Fransisco, and New York. These cities are further categorized into four geographical regions—South, Midwest, West, and Northeast—offering a structured dataset that enables both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluations.

Each ad in the dataset contains metadata that links text and visual components, providing a rich resource for studying multimodal patterns, vendor identification, and verification tasks. The dataset is uniquely suited for multimodal authorship attribution, vendor linking, stylometric analysis, and understanding the interplay between textual and visual patterns in advertisements. All text descriptions are carefully processed to redact any explicit references to phone numbers, email addresses, advertisement IDs, age-related information, or other contact details that could be used to identify individuals or vendors.