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Web-based human trafficking activity has increased in recent years but it remains sparsely dispersed among escort advertisements and difficult to identify due to its often-latent nature. The use of intelligent systems to detect trafficking can thus have a direct impact on investigative resource allocation and decision-making, and, more broadly, help curb a widespread social problem. Trafficking detection involves assigning a normalized score to a set of escort advertisements crawled from the Web -- a higher score indicates a greater risk of trafficking-related (involuntary) activities. In this paper, we define and study the problem of trafficking detection and present a trafficking detection pipeline architecture developed over three years of research within the DARPA Memex program. Drawing on multi-institutional data, systems, and experiences collected during this time, we also conduct post hoc bias analyses and present a …