Archive of News

2024

May 2024: Rabab Alkhalifa has passed her PhD viva, subject to minor revisions, congratulations!
April 2024: New paper with Rrubaa Panchendrarajan accepted in Expert Systems with Applications: "Synergizing Machine Learning & Symbolic Methods: A Survey on Hybrid Approaches to Natural Language Processing"
March 2024: New paper accepted at SIGIR: "Combining Large Language Models and Crowdsourcing for Hybrid Human-AI Misinformation Detection"
March 2024: New paper with Rrubaa Panchendrarajan accepted in the Natural Language Processing Journal: "Claim Detection for Automated Fact-checking: A Survey on Monolingual, Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Research"
March 2024: Aiqi Jiang has passed her PhD viva, subject to minor revisions, congratulations!
February 2024: New paper with Eszter Zsisku and Haim Dubossarsky accepted at ACM WebSci: "Hate Speech Detection and Reclaimed Language: Mitigating False Positives and Compounded Discrimination"
January 2024: New paper with Xia Zeng accepted at EACL (Findings): "MAPLE: Micro Analysis of Pairwise Language Evolution for Few-Shot Claim Verification"
January 2024: I have received an award as the 2023 Best Editor for the Online Social Networks and Media journal.

2023

December 2023: I will be serving as Area Chair (AC) for NAACL 2024
October 2023: I am now the editor-in-chief for Frontiers in AI's Natural Language Processing section.
October 2023: Welcome to new PhD students Yufeng Li and Pui Chung (Jacky) Siu!
September 2023: I will be serving as Senior Area Chair (SAC) for EACL 2024
September 2023: Welcome to new PhD student Rrubaa Panchendrarajan!
September 2023: I will be serving as Area Chair (AC) for LREC-COLING 2024
September 2023: I will be serving as Senior PC member (SPC) for ICWSM 2024 and WebSci 2024
August 2023: We will be running a new edition of the LongEval lab on longitudinal evaluation of models at CLEF 2024.
June 2023: I will be serving as Area Chair (AC) for EMNLP 2023
June 2023: New paper with Raneem Alharthi et al accepted in IEEE Access: "Target-Oriented Investigation of Online Abusive Attacks: A Dataset and Analysis"
June 2023: New paper with Peiling Yi accepted in Online Social Networks and Media: "Session-based Cyberbullying Detection in Social Media: A Survey"
April 2023: New paper with Amani Abumansour accepted in PeerJ Computer Science: "Check-worthy Claim Detection across Topics for Automated Fact-checking"
March 2023: New paper with Parisa Jamadi accepted in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems: "Few-shot Learning for Cross-Target Stance Detection by Aggregating Multimodal Embeddings"
February 2023: I will be giving a keynote talk at this year's ICWSM data challenge on Temporal Social Data.
February 2023: New paper with Peiling Yi accepted at The Web Conference: "Learning like human annotators: Cyberbullying detection in lengthy social media sessions"
February 2023: We will be running a new edition of the Mediate workshop on Computational Journalism at ICWSM 2023 -- submit by 27th March
January 2023: Welcome to new PhD student Hyunkyung Park!
January 2023: New paper with Xia Zeng accepted at EACL (Findings): "Active PETs: Active Data Annotation Prioritisation for Few-Shot Claim Verification with Pattern Exploiting Training"

2022

December 2022: I will be serving as Area Chair (AC) for ACL 2023
December 2022: We will be organising the First International Workshop on Online Social Networks in the Human-centric Metaverse [OSNeHM] at WWW -- see more details.
November 2022: New paper with Rabab Alkhalifa et al. accepted in IP&M: "Building for Tomorrow: Assessing the Temporal Persistence of Text Classifiers"
November 2022: Two papers accepted at ICWSM:
- "SexWEs: Domain-Aware Word Embeddings via Cross-lingual Semantic Specialisation for Chinese Sexism Detection in Social Media" with Aiqi Jiang.
- "AnnoBERT: Effectively Representing Multiple Annotators' Label Choices to Improve Hate Speech Detection" with Wenjie Yin et al.
October 2022: New paper with Xiaoyu Guo accepted in Journal of Information Science: "Cluster-based Deep Ensemble Learning for Emotion Classification in Internet Memes"
October 2022: I will be serving as Area Chair (AC) for EACL 2023
October 2022: New paper with Elena Kochkina et al. accepted in IP&M: "Evaluating the Generalisability of Neural Rumour Verification Models"
September 2022: I will be giving a keynote talk at AIDisinfo 2022
September 2022: New paper with Xia Zeng accepted in PeerJ Computer Science: "Aggregating pairwise semantic differences for few-shot claim verification"
August 2022: We will be running a lab / shared task on "Temporal Persistence of Text Classifiers" at CLEF 2023 - more info
July 2022: I will be serving as Associate Chair (AC) for CSCW 2023.
June 2022: I will be a panellist at a SIGIR 2022 panel on misinformation.
May 2022: I will be serving as Area Chair (AC) for COLING 2022 ('Offensive and non-inclusive language detection and analysis' track).
April 2022: New paper with Wenjie Yin accepted in Online Social Networks and Media: "Hidden behind the obvious: misleading keywords and implicitly abusive language on social media"
April 2022: New paper with Miguel Arana-Catania et al accepted at NAACL: "Natural Language Inference with Self-Attention for Veracity Assessment of Pandemic Claims"
March 2022: Two papers accepted at ICWSM:
- "Cyberbullying detection across social media platforms via platform-aware adversarial encoding" with Peiling Yi.
- "Improving Zero-shot Cross-lingual Hate Speech Detection with pseudo-label fine-tuning of Transformer Language Models" with Haris Bin Zia et al.
March 2022: I'm now a section editor (HCI) for PeerJ Computer Science.
February 2022: New grant led by Nishanth Sastry: AP4L: Adaptive PETs to Protect & emPower People during Life Transitions
February 2022: We'll be running the 3rd edition of the MEDIATE workshop at ICWSM -- submit by 27th March, 2022.
January 2022: We're guest editing a special issue for PeerJ Computer Science on "Analysis and Mining of Social Media Data" -- submit by 27th May, 2022.
January 2022: New paper with Rabab Alkhalifa accepted in International Journal of Digital Humanities: "Capturing Stance Dynamics in Social Media: Open Challenges and Research Directions"

2021

December 2021: We are running a special session at IJCNN 2022: "Artificial Intelligence for Countering Disinformation and Information warfare" -- submit by 14th February 2022 (abstract by 31st January).
November 2021: New paper with Aiqi Jiang accepted in Online Social Networks and Media: "SWSR: A Chinese Dataset and Lexicon for Online Sexism Detection"
October 2021: Welcome to visiting PhD student Weihe Zhai!
September 2021: New paper with Noman Ashraf accepted in PeerJ Computer Science: "Abusive Language Detection in YouTube Comments Leveraging Replies as Conversational Context"
September 2021: New paper with Xia Zeng and Amani Abumansour accepted in Language and Linguistics Compass: "Automated Fact-checking: A Survey"
September 2021: New paper accepted in IEEE Access: "Threatening Language Detection and Target Identification in Urdu Tweets"
September 2021: I'll be giving a keynote talk at the PAN 2021 lab at CLEF on "Generalisation in social media research: from fact verification to hate speech detection".
September 2021: I'm now an associate editor for the Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences journal.
August 2021: New paper with Ruben Sanchez-Corcuera accepted in IEEE Access: "Analysing the Existence of Organisation Specific Languages on Twitter"
July 2021: Welcome to new PhD student Aida Halitaj!
July 2021: Three papers accepted at ACM Hypertext:
- "Cross-lingual Capsule Network for Hate Speech Detection in Social Media" with Aiqi Jiang.
- "Weakly Supervised Cross-platform Teenager Detection with Adversarial BERT" with Peiling Yi.
- "Opinions are Made to be Changed: Temporally Adaptive Stance Classification" with Rabab Alkhalifa.
June 2021: I'm now an associate editor for the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence journal.
May 2021: New paper with Wenjie Yin accepted in PeerJ Computer Science: " Towards generalisable hate speech detection: a review on obstacles and solutions"
May 2021: I'm now an academic editor for the Electronics journal.
May 2021: We're organising a shared task on multilingual lexical normalisation: MultiLexNorm
April 2021: Welcome to new PhD student Dina Pisarevskaya!
March 2021: I'll be giving a keynote talk at the ROMCIR 2021 workshop, co-located with ECIR 2021.
March 2021: We will be organising the 2nd workshop on Online Misinformation and Harm-Aware Recommender Systems (OHARS) at RecSys 2021 -- submit by 24th July!
March 2021: I will be serving as Area Chair (AC) for EMNLP 2021.
February 2021: New paper with Leon Fröhling accepted in PeerJ Computer Science: "Feature-based detection of automated language models: Tackling GPT-2, GPT-3 and Grover"
January 2021: New paper with Diogo Cortiz accepted in International Review of Information Ethics: "Ethical and Technical Challenges of AI in Tackling Hate Speech"
January 2021: Welcome to new PhD student Parisa Jamadi!

2020

December 2020: New paper with Neeraj Vashistha accepted in Information: "Online Multilingual Hate Speech Detection: Experimenting with Hindi and English Social Media"
December 2020: New paper with Xiaoyu Guo accepted in Information studies: Theory & Application (in Chinese): "A Review of Internet Meme Studies: State of the Art and Outlook"
December 2020: I will be serving as senior PC member (SPC) for IJCAI 2021.
October 2020: I will be serving as senior PC member (SPC) for ICWSM 2021, as associate chair (AC) for CSCW 2021 and as area chair (AC) for NAACL 2021.
October 2020: Welcome to new PhD student Amani Abumansour!
September 2020: Our EPSRC proposal "Learning from COVID-19: An AI-enabled evidence-driven framework for claim veracity assessment during pandemics" has been funded!
September 2020: Welcome to new PhD students Xia Zeng and Peiling Yi!

September 2020:

Birds of a Feather Check Together: Leveraging Homophily for Sequential Rumour Detection

August 2020: New paper accepted at CIKM 2020: "Exploiting Class Labels to Boost Performance on Embedding-based Text Classification"
July 2020: New paper accepted in ACM DTRAP: "Towards Automated Factchecking: Developing an Annotation Schema and Benchmark for Consistent Automated Claim Detection"
July 2020: I'm now a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
July 2020: We will be guest editing a special issue on "Detecting, Understanding and Countering Online Harms" for the Online Social Networks and Media journal -- submit by 15th November.
June 2020: New paper accepted in ACM TWEB: Early Detection of Social Media Hoaxes at Scale.
June 2020: We will be guest editing a special issue on "Intelligent Systems for Tackling Online Harms" for the Personal and Ubiquitous Computing journal -- submit by 4th December!
April 2020: We have established the new Social Data Science lab at QMUL, follow us on Twitter!
March 2020: We will be running the first Workshop on Online Misinformation- and Harm-Aware Recommender Systems, co-located with ACM RecSys 2020!
January 2020: Welcome to new PhD students Wenjie Yin and Raneem Alharthi!

2019

November 2019: New grant proposal funded! This is a Royal Society International Exchange to work with Daniela Godoy (UNICEN, Argentina) on an 'Online Harm-Aware Recommender System'!
November 2019: I'm now a Section Editor-in-Chief for the MDPI Information journal.
October 2019: Will be presenting a tutorial on 'Detection and Resolution of Rumors and Misinformation with NLP' with Leon Derczynski at COLING 2020
October 2019: We will be running a new edition of the workshop on Rumours and Deception in Social Media (RDSM), co-located with COLING 2020 -- submit by 20th May
October 2019: We are guest editing a special issue of the Information journal on Tackling Misinformation Online -- submit by 31st October
October 2019: Our project proposal 'Hate Speech Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Exploring Bias on Hate Perception' has been selected to be funded by Facebook Research!
September 2019: Welcome to new PhD students Aiqi Jiang and Rabab Alkhalifa!
September 2019: Paper with Aiqi Jiang on cross-domain review rating prediction has been accepted for publication in PeerJ Computer Science!
September 2019: Survey paper on mining social media for newsgathering has been accepted for publication in Online Social Networks and Media!
August 2019: I am now an editorial board member for the Information journal.
July 2019: I am now an academic editor for the PeerJ Computer Science journal.
June 2019: I'm honoured to have been named among the best reviewers for ICWSM 2019!
June 2019: I have joined the editorial board of the Online Social Networks and Media journal.
April 2019: Our Special Issue on Processing Social Media in Real-Time is now published in the Information Processing & Management journal.
March 2019: Our Special Issue on Social Media Mining for Journalism is now published in the Online Information Review journal.
March 2019: I have joined Queen Mary University of London as a lecturer.

2018

December 2018: Paper studying the public perception on the opportunities and challenges of the Internet of Things has been accepted for publication in PLOS ONE.
November 2018: Paper on Using Gaussian Processes for Rumour Stance Classification in Social Media, led by Michal Lukasik, has been accepted for publication in ACM TOIS.
September 2018: I'm joining the editorial board of the Information Processing & Management journal.
July 2018: Our introductory article to the IP&M Special Issue on 'Processing social media in real-time' is now online -- the special issue is in preparation.
May 2018: Paper on Multi-task Learning for Rumour Verification, led by Elena Kochkina, has been accepted for publication in COLING 2018.
May 2018: We will be running a new edition of the RumourEval shared task at SemEval 2019!
April 2018: We will be running the 2nd workshop on Rumors and Deception in Social Media (RDSM) at CIKM 2018 -- CfP.
February 2018: New paper assessing the persistence of Twitter datasets has been accepted for publication in JASIST.
January 2018: I'm taking up a new role as assistant professor at the University of Warwick, where I'll be teaching Natural Language Processing and Data Mining.

2017

December 2017: Our paper studying independence movements through social media has been accepted for publication in IEEE Intelligent Systems.
November 2017: Our paper on discourse-aware rumour stance classification has been accepted for publication in Information Processing & Management.
November 2017: I'm co-guest editing a special issue for the Online Information Review Journal on Social Media Mining for Journalism. Deadline is 28th February, 2018!
November 2017: Our survey paper Detection and Resolution of Rumours in Social Media: A Survey has been accepted for publication in ACM Computing Surveys.
September 2017: Our demo paper TOTEMSS: Topic-based, Temporal Sentiment Summarisation for Twitter has been accepted at IJCNLP.
August 2017: Our paper Microblog Analysis as a Programme of Work has been accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Social Computing.
July 2017: We've got 3 papers accepted at SocInfo 2017 on rumour detection, rumour stance classification and tweet clustering!
April 2017: Our paper on country-level geolocation of tweets has been accepted for publication in IEEE TKDE!
March 2017: Our CHI 2017 paper on the use of UGC in journalistic practice received a best paper award!
February 2017: I'm co-guest editing a special issue for the Information Processing & Management Journal on Processing Social Media in Real-Time. Deadline is ~~7th July~~ 31st July!