Description

In recent years we have witnessed the rise of social media, which have enabled people to virtually share information with a large number of users with little-to-no regulation or quality control. On the one hand, this has enabled anyone with a computer and internet access to rapidly create and disseminate content. On the other hand, it has also opened the door for malicious users, including automated bots, to rapidly spread disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda. These malicious users can now reach audiences at an unprecedented scale. This has given rise to the proliferation of false information that is typically created either (a) to attract network traffic in order to secure financial gain through advertising revenue (e.g. clickbait), or (b) to affect individual people's beliefs - something that can ultimately lead to influencing major events such as elections or views on public health. There are strong indications that false information was weaponized on an unprecedented scale during the 2016 U.S. and the 2018 Brazilian presidential campaigns, among many others. The workshop aims to bring together researchers from both academia and industry to discuss bias, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda in online news and in social media.

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

  • Bias
  • Bots
  • Check-worthiness
  • Claim extraction
  • Claim source detection
  • Clickbait
  • Deep fakes
  • Disinformation
  • Echo chambers
  • Fact-checking
  • Fake reviews
  • Harassment/bullying
  • Hate speech
  • Hyper-partisanship
  • Misinformation
  • Offensive language
  • Polarization
  • Propaganda identification/analysis
  • Seminar users
  • Source reliability
  • Stance detection
  • Supporting evidence retrieval
  • Trolls
  • Trust
  • Truth

Workshop Format

We kindly ask you to submit abstracts addressing one of the topics above from the perspective of use cases; tools; resources; and preliminary experimental results.

Abstracts should be in Socinfo format, 1-2 pages long. Abstracts will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and authors of selected abstracts will be assigned a time slot for a short presentation (15 minutes each) to present their ideas. Selected abstracts will be made available on this website.

The workshop will include invited talks by experts from academia and the industry, which would discuss the issue from various perspectives. The workshop will end with a panel discussion.

Dates

Schedule
September 5th Deadline for abstract submission
September 12th Notification of acceptance.
November 18th Workshop at Socinfo'19

Workshop Schedule

The workshop will be held on November 18th at Hilton Hotel, Doha, Qatar in room Qamar 2 (see conference website for updates).

8:30 - 8:35 Welcome Workshop Organisers
8:35 - 9:25 Invited Talk "FakeDet: Research on Fake News Detection at Qatar University", Tamer Elsayed, Qatar University (slides)
9:25 - 9:50 Contributed Talk "Containing the spread of Fake Images using Computer Vision and Image Processing", Piyush Aggarwal (slides)
9:50 - 10:15 Contributed Talk "The Influence of Presumed Media Influence on News Sharing among Polarized Audience: A Korean Context", Jinah Lee, Kwangho Lee
10:15 - 10:45 Coffee Break
10:45 - 11:10 Contributed Talk "Measuring the Adequacy of High-Stakes Communications", Timothy Habick (slides)
11:10 - 11:35 Contributed Talk "Automatic analysis of linguistic features in Communist propaganda texts ", Veronika Vincze, Martina Katalin, Orsolya Ring (slides)
11:35 - 12:30 Invited Talk "Detecting Misinformation: Where the Rubber Meets the Road", Grant Franklin Totten and Mahmoud Selim, Aljazeera

Invited Speakers

Tamer Elsayed

Title of the Talk

"FakeDet: Research on Fake News Detection at Qatar University"

Abstract

Fake news becomes ubiquitous; therefore combating it becomes mandatory. In this talk, I will present research efforts and initiatives that we started recently at Qatar University to tackle the problem of fake news detection and fact checking, especially in Arabic. I will start with our work on re-ranking Web search results for better fact checking that studies how good current search engines are for finding pages that are useful in verifying given claims. I will then discuss our CheckThat! lab initiative that we co-organize at CLEF Conference for 3 years in a row. CheckThat! aims at supporting investigative journalists and volunteers for finding check-worthy claims and identifying evidence to verify those claims. Since verifying news might need “context”, I will also present very recent work on finding background articles that can help news-readers conceptualize the story of a given news article with more knowledge. Finally, I will briefly introduce and outline our new QNRF-supported project on fake news detection over Arabic social media in collaboration with University of Edinburgh and AlJazeera Network.

Biography

Dr. Tamer Elsayed is an associate professor of Computer Science at Qatar University (QU). He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Alexandria University in Egypt, and Ph.D. degree from University of Maryland (UMD) in the United States in 2009. He also had an internship at Google in 2007. After getting his Ph.D., he worked as a researcher at UMD, KAUST, and Microsoft, before joining QU in 2012. His main research interests are information retrieval, data science, and big data analytics. He published more than 70 publications in top-tier journals and conferences. He received two best paper awards and his research team at QU was ranked first at TREC 2016 (microblog track) and second at TREC 2019 (news track) conferences. He co-organized several workshops and evaluation labs in international conferences, and he is the co-chair of ACM Africa Summer School on Machine Learning for Data Mining and Search (AFIRM). He led three NPRP projects funded by QNRF and leads an active research group (bigIR) at QU.

Grant Franklin Totten

Title of the Talk

"Detecting Misinformation: Where the Rubber Meets the Road" (in collaboration with Mahmoud Selim, Al Jazeera)

Biography

Grant Totten is the Head of Media & Emerging Platforms for Al Jazeera Media Network. He is passionate about empowering newsrooms and journalists to tell more compelling stories to its audiences more efficiently through applying Data Science, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning and other emerging technologies in useful ways to radically transform media workflows and provide intelligence across the media lifecycle from contribution to distribution from content creation, curation, Media Asset Management, Production, Distribution and Audience Engagement. With over 72 bureaus worldwide, Al Jazeera Media Network provides breaking news, analysis, programs, documentaries and research in over 100 countries in English, Arabic, French, Spanish and Bosnian languages. Grant has worked in the Data Science space for over 23 years and has founded and supported multiple startups throughout his career.

Organisers:

  • Giovanni da San Martino (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University)
  • Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University)
  • Alberto Barrón-Cedeño (Università di Bologna)
  • Jisun An (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University)
  • Haewoon Kwak (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University)
  • Banu Akdenizli (Northwestern University, Qatar)
  • Marc O. Jones (Hamad Bin Khalifa University)

Contact

If you have any question about the workshop, feel free to send us an email.

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