Researchers at Lancaster University hope to be able to pick up on vocabulary used by perverts posing as children in Internet chat rooms and trail them as they move around the Internet.

The team is at the forefront of the technology which uses new developments in language analysis to catch out paedophiles by phrases and code words often used.

Lancaster University has just launched Project Isis – a three-year Child Protection Initiative.

Lead researcher Professor Awais Rashid from the department of computing said: "Paedophiles often pose as children online and can be difficult to track as they move quickly from site to site, assuming multiple identities."

He added culprits use their own language which changes to avoid detection.

But researchers hope to discover whether new language identification techniques can be used to crack the shared vocabulary of code words used by groups of paedophiles who share files online.

Prof Rashid said: "The Internet also provides other opportunities for paedophiles, such as platforms where they can come together to form secret file-sharing networks.

"We hope that using language analysis techniques we can identify these networks and also follow them around the Internet."