Related papers: Into the Void: Understanding Online Health Informa…
The model of the attention economy, where content producers compete for the attention of users, relies on two key forces: information supply and demand. This study leverages the feedback loop between these forces to develop a method for…
Online social media platforms such as YouTube have a wide, global reach. However, little is known about the experience of low-resourced language speakers on such platforms; especially in how they experience and navigate harmful content. To…
The lack of comprehensive, high-quality health data in developing nations creates a roadblock for combating the impacts of disease. One key challenge is understanding the health information needs of people in these nations. Without…
The content moderation systems used by social media sites are a topic of widespread interest and research, but less is known about the use of similar systems by web search engines. For example, Google Search attempts to help its users…
The healthcare environment is commonly referred to as "information-rich" but also "knowledge poor". Healthcare systems collect huge amounts of data from various sources: lab reports, medical letters, logs of medical tools or programs,…
Emerging digital technologies are exacerbating the existing divide in Open Access Data (OAD) between high-and low-resource languages, excluding many communities from participating in the global digital transformation. In this PhD proposal,…
Although the multilingual capability of LLMs offers new opportunities to overcome the language barrier, do these capabilities translate into real-life scenarios where linguistic divide and knowledge conflicts between multilingual sources…
The expanding influence of social media platforms over the past decade has impacted the way people communicate. The level of obscurity provided by social media and easy accessibility of the internet has facilitated the spread of hate…
In recent years, we have witnessed the proliferation of large amounts of online content generated directly by users with virtually no form of external control, leading to the possible spread of misinformation. The search for effective…
Many people share information in social media or forums, like food they eat, sports activities they do or events which have been visited. This also applies to information about a person's health status. Information we share online unveils…
Online Knowledge Repositories (OKRs) like Wikipedia offer communities a way to share and preserve information about themselves and their ways of living. However, for communities with low-resourced languages -- including most African…
In today's global digital landscape, misinformation transcends linguistic boundaries, posing a significant challenge for moderation systems. Most approaches to misinformation detection are monolingual, focused on high-resource languages,…
Older adults' need for quality health information has never been more critical as during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, they are susceptible to the wide-spread misinformation disseminated through search engines and social media. To build a…
The limited information (data voids) on political topics relevant to underrepresented communities has facilitated the spread of disinformation. Independent journalists who combat disinformation in underrepresented communities have reported…
This study examines the digital representation of African languages and the challenges this presents for current language detection tools. We evaluate their performance on Yoruba, Kinyarwanda, and Amharic. While these languages are spoken…
Persistent inequalities in political knowledge are a central concern in political communication. We organize the mechanisms underlying the knowledge-gap literature by distinguishing between individual preconditions, structural features of…
The technological revolution of the Internet has digitized the social, economic, political, and cultural activities of billions of humans. While researchers have been paying due attention to concerns of misinformation and bias, these…
Search engines rely heavily on term-based approaches that represent queries and documents as bags of words. Text---a document or a query---is represented by a bag of its words that ignores grammar and word order, but retains word frequency…
Equitable access to reliable health information is vital when integrating AI into healthcare. Yet, information quality varies across languages, raising concerns about the reliability and consistency of multilingual Large Language Models…
Background: Clinical trials rely on transparent inclusion criteria to ensure generalizability. In contrast, benchmarks validating health-related large language models (LLMs) rarely characterize the "patient" or "query" populations they…