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Classification of crisis events, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks and pandemics, is a crucial task to create early signals and inform relevant parties for spontaneous actions to reduce overall damage. Despite crisis such as…
Hate speech is plaguing the cyberspace along with user-generated content. This paper investigates the role of conversational context in the annotation and detection of online hate and counter speech, where context is defined as the…
The utilization of social media material in journalistic workflows is increasing, demanding automated methods for the identification of mis- and disinformation. Since textual contradiction across social media posts can be a signal of…
We present the Multi-Modal Discussion Transformer (mDT), a novel methodfor detecting hate speech in online social networks such as Reddit discussions. In contrast to traditional comment-only methods, our approach to labelling a comment as…
Understanding toxicity in user conversations is undoubtedly an important problem. Addressing "covert" or implicit cases of toxicity is particularly hard and requires context. Very few previous studies have analysed the influence of…
Identifying arguments is a necessary prerequisite for various tasks in automated discourse analysis, particularly within contexts such as political debates, online discussions, and scientific reasoning. In addition to theoretical advances…
Fake news poses a significant threat to public opinion and social stability in modern society. This study presents a comparative evaluation of BERT-like encoder-only models and autoregressive decoder-only large language models (LLMs) for…
Social media tend to be rife with rumours while new reports are released piecemeal during breaking news. Interestingly, one can mine multiple reactions expressed by social media users in those situations, exploring their stance towards…
Controversial posts are those that split the preferences of a community, receiving both significant positive and significant negative feedback. Our inclusion of the word "community" here is deliberate: what is controversial to some…
The truth is significantly hampered by massive rumors that spread along with breaking news or popular topics. Since there is sufficient corpus gathered from the same domain for model training, existing rumor detection algorithms show…
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on various areas of human life. Hence, the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences are being actively discussed on social media. However, not all social media posts are truthful. Many of them…
This paper presents a multi-platform computational pipeline geared to identify social media posts discussing (known) conspiracy theories. We use 189 conspiracy claims collected by Snopes, and find 66k posts and 277k comments on Reddit, and…
We study the problem of performing automatic stance classification on social media with neural architectures such as BERT. Although these architectures deliver impressive results, their level is not yet comparable to the one of humans and…
The social Web is a widely used platform for online discussion. Across social media, users can start discussions by posting a topical image, url, or message. Upon seeing this initial post, other users may add their own comments to the post,…
We propose a novel approach framed in terms of information theory and entropy to tackle the issue of conspiracy theories propagation. We start with the report of an event (such as 9/11 terroristic attack) represented as a series of…
Subjective bias detection is critical for applications like propaganda detection, content recommendation, sentiment analysis, and bias neutralization. This bias is introduced in natural language via inflammatory words and phrases, casting…
The prevalence of social media has made information sharing possible across the globe. The downside, unfortunately, is the wide spread of misinformation. Methods applied in most previous rumor classifiers give an equal weight, or attention,…
The current prevalence of conspiracy theories on the internet is a significant issue, tackled by many computational approaches. However, these approaches fail to recognize the relevance of distinguishing between texts which contain a…
Hateful rhetoric is plaguing online discourse, fostering extreme societal movements and possibly giving rise to real-world violence. A potential solution to this growing global problem is citizen-generated counter speech where citizens…
The internet today has become an unrivalled source of information where people converse on content based websites such as Quora, Reddit, StackOverflow and Twitter asking doubts and sharing knowledge with the world. A major arising problem…