JRS III: Democracy Threats and Public Discourse Analysis
The JRS III course is designed to provide Doctoral Candidates (DCs) and attendees with in-depth knowledge and practical skills related to data science, corpora analysis, and misinformation detection, with a specific focus on applications in social sciences and hybrid research domains.
This course is designed to enrich participants’ methodological toolkit, enhance their ability to handle complex data, and prepare them to tackle misinformation and toxicity in online environments. Through hands-on training and case studies, participants will gain valuable skills applicable to both academic research and real-world problem-solving.
CLUSTER EVENT IBERIFIER & HYBRIDS: Artificial Intelligence & Disinformation (24-25 October 2024)
This cluster event is a joint initiative between the HYBRIDS project and IBERIFIER, bringing together experts to explore the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Disinformation. The event will serve to introduce the main objectives of the two projects and will feature presentations on some of their main interests and research. A round table will also be organized, with the participation of several journalists from different media, to discuss on how AI and language models can both detect and contribute to the spread of disinformation, with a particular focus on the role of media.
About IBERIFIER:
IBERIFIER is a digital media observatory for Spain and Portugal, funded by the European Commission and connected to the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO). Coordinated by the University of Navarra, IBERIFIER brings together twelve universities, five fact-checking organizations, news agencies, and six multidisciplinary research centers. The observatory focuses on combating disinformation and promoting media literacy across the Iberian Peninsula. You can find more information about Iberifier here.
About HYBRIDS:
The HYBRIDS project, funded by the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (HE MSCA) and co-funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) HE funding guarantee, addresses a broad spectrum of topics related to disinformation, abusive language, and public discourse. These include analyzing social media discourse, tracking the impact of political speech on public opinion, detecting hate speech, identifying toxic bots, and fact-checking claims, among others. Coordinated by CiTIUS at the University of Santiago de Compostela, the HYBRIDS consortium includes partner universities, research centers, non-profit organizations, and innovation companies from across Europe. You can find more information about HYBRIDS here.
This event provides a unique opportunity to explore the challenges and opportunities AI presents in the fight against disinformation, with contributions from both the academic and media sectors.
The full program, including detailed content and schedule, will be published soon. Stay tuned for updates!
Hourly Schedule
Day 1: Tuesday, October 22
- 9:00 - 11:00
- Corpora Analysis in Social and Humanistic Domains
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Speakers:
Camilla Casula (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
Day 2: Wednesday, October 23
- 9:00 - 11:00
- Foundations on Detection and Resolution of Rumours and Misinformation in HYBRIDS case studies
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Speakers:
Arkaitz Zubiaga (Queen Mary University of London)
- 14:30 - 16:30
- Exploring constructiveness and toxicity in online comments
- Abusive comments, toxic behaviour, harassment, misinformation and fake news---it seems like a bleak landscape online. Some of these problems can be solved with text classification techniques. If we can identify ‘nice’ and ‘nasty’ comments, then we can promote the former and filter out the latter. If we can reliably identify misinformation and fake news stories, then we can stop them before they spread online. My lab is actively working on these issues and I will discuss, in this talk, an ongoing research project which aims at identifying constructive comments on news stories. Using both ‘classic’ machine learning (Support Vector Machines with linguistic features) and deep learning methods, we have built a classifier to identify instances of constructive comments, defined as those that are related to the article, intend to create a civil dialogue and provide specific points supported by evidence. The classifier was built using a large annotated corpus of comments (12,000 comments) from the Canadian daily The Globe and Mail. Our results show that constructiveness can be identified reliably and that a mix of features characterize constructive comments, including length, specific points and the presence of personal stories. The goal of this project is to build a moderation platform to allow constructive comments to be featured more prominently, which will hopefully encourage more constructiveness in online spaces.
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Speakers:
Maite Taboada (Simon Fraser University)
Day 3: Thursday, October 24
- 8:55 - 9:00
- Opening
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Speakers:
Pablo Gamallo Otero (HYBRIDS Coordinator)
- 9:00 - 9:15
- Analyzing the tactics and strategies adopted by individual and collective actors to propagate political opinions through media platforms.
- Presentation of HYBRIDS PhD Projects
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Speakers:
Erik Bran Marino (DC at UEVORA)
- 9:15 - 9:30
- Group 2
- Presentation of HYBRIDS PhD Projects.
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Speakers:
Rrubaa Panchendrarajan (DC at QMUL)
- 9:30 - 9:45
- Multimodal and Multilingual Claim Retrieval for Automated Fact-Checking
- Presentation of HYBRIDS PhD Projects.
- 9:45 - 10:00
- Group 4
- Presentation of HYBRIDS PhD Projects.
- 10:00 - 11:00
- Presentation of Iberifier
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Speakers:
Ramón Salaverría (IBERIFIER Coordinator)
- 11:00 - 11:30
- COFFEE BREAK
- 11:30 - 12:30
- Talk 1, IBERIFIER
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Speakers:
Paolo Rosso (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia)
- 12:30 - 13:30
- Talk 2, IBERIFIER
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Speakers:
Miguel Paisana (OberCom)
- 13:30 - 16:00
- LUNCH
- 16:00 - 18:00
- ROUND TABLE: AI, Disinformation, and Media
- The objective of this round table is to bring together journalists from various media outlets to share their experiences on the issue of disinformation. The discussion will focus on the role of AI and language models, exploring their contributions both in detecting disinformation and in its malicious spread.
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Speakers:
Alfonso Pato (elDiario.es), César Rodríguez (La Voz de Galicia), Guillermo Infantes (Newtral), Íñigo Caínzos (Cadena SER), Pablo Hernández Escayola (MALDITA.ES)
Day 4: Friday, October 25
- 11:15 - 13:00
- Verification journalists against disinformation
- The presentation will consist of an overview of the fact-checking work carried out by journalists specialized in verification. First, we will discuss the concept of disinformation that we work with at Newtral.es to determine what is verifiable and what is not, as well as the common patterns we observe in so-called "hoaxes." I will also explain how disinformation exploits crisis contexts and present some specific examples in the following areas: hate speech, humanitarian and migratory crises, diplomatic relations, health, electoral processes, and wars. Lastly, I will mention the role of artificial intelligence in the field of disinformation.
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Speakers:
Guillermo Infantes (Newtral)
- 13:00 - 14:30
- LUNCH
- 14:30 - 15:30
- Final discussion and farewell
Date
- Oct 22 - 25 2024
Time
- All Day
More Info
Organizer
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Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes (CiTIUS), Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (USC)
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Website
https://citius.gal/
Speakers
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Arkaitz Zubiaga (Queen Mary University of London)
My research revolves around Social Data Science, interdisciplinary research bridging Computational Social Science and Natural Language Processing.
I am a senior lecturer (associate professor) at Queen Mary University of London, where I co-lead the Social Data Science lab, I’m a member of the Computational Linguistics Lab and a DERI Fellow. My research revolves around Social Data Science, interdisciplinary research bridging Computational Social Science and Natural Language Processing. I’m particularly interested in linking online data with events in the real world, among others for tackling problematic issues on the Web and social media that can have a damaging effect on individuals or society at large, such as hate speech, misinformation, inequality, biases and other forms of online harm. I have published 140+ papers (including 50+ journal articles). I serve in the editorial boards of 7 journals and I’m a regular SPC member for top conferences in computational social science, natural language processing and artificial intelligence.
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Maite Taboada (Simon Fraser University)
Maite Taboada is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada). Her research combines discourse analysis and computational linguistics, with an emphasis on discourse relations and sentiment analysis. Current work focuses on the analysis of online comments, drawing insights from corpus linguistics, computational linguistics and big data. Other projects include a study of fake news online and the Gender Gap Tracker. She is the director of the Discourse Processing Lab at SFU.
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Ramón Salaverría (IBERIFIER Coordinator)
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Pablo Hernández Escayola (MALDITA.ES)
Pablo Hernández is the Academic Research Coordinator at Maldita.es. He started working at the fact-checking organization in 2020. He has contributed to research journals such as adComunica and Dilemata, offering his perspective on the issue of disinformation and how to combat it. Before that, he also worked as a journalist at La Sexta, where he was a news editor and worked on information programs for 13 years, as well as at CNN+, Cuatro, Localia, ABC, and the Agencia EFE.
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Pablo Gamallo Otero (HYBRIDS Coordinator)CiTIUS-USC
I’m associate professor at USC and my research interest is focused on Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction.
I defended my Linguistics PhD thesis at the Université Blaise Pascal (France) in 1998. Then, I won a post-doc position at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, New University of Lisbon (Portugal), where I worked for four years. Since 2004, I have been working at USC, first as a Ramón y Cajal research fellow and now as Associate Professor. I was the promoter and co-founder of Cilenis, a Spin-Off on language technology and was awarded with the prestigious “Beca Leonardo” funded by FBBVA, in 2016. I am currently a member of the Computational Linguistics group (LComp) of the USC, of which I was co-founder, and a researcher attached to the CiTIUS. I have around 150 peer-reviewed publications. Among them, I am the author of 2 books, 8 book chapters and 53 articles in ranked Q1 or Q2 (7 in the first decile). Concerning funding, I have been the Principal Investigator of 9 R&D projects and 9 transfert contracts with companies and organisations, all of them within the field of natural language processing.
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Erik Bran Marino (DC at UEVORA)
Erik Bran Marino is an Italian PhD researcher and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Universidade de Évora in Portugal, contributing to the HYBRIDS project. His work bridges natural language processing (NLP) and social sciences to detect political disinformation in online media. Erik earned his Master’s degree in Sociology and Social Research from the Università degli Studi di Torino, graduating with honors. His thesis investigated Russian manipulation of Western public opinion through conspiracy networks on Telegram. He has presented his research progress at international conferences such as APSA in Philadelphia and AECPA in Burgos. His publications cover topics like sentiment analysis in Portuguese political manifestos and the polarization loop on social media. Proficient in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and intermediate in Portuguese, Erik combines his passion for NLP and AI technologies with his social science background to advance interdisciplinary research.
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Paolo Rosso (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia)
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Rrubaa Panchendrarajan (DC at QMUL)
Rrubaa Panchendrarajan is a researcher specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and currently serves as a HYBRIDS Doctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network. She holds a Master’s degree from the National University of Singapore, and a first-class honors bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Rrubaa has held diverse roles across academia and industry, including Software Engineer, Lecturer, and Research Associate, giving her the ability to bridge theoretical research with practical applications. Her experience is complemented by numerous publications in leading journals and conferences, with her current research focusing on automated fact-checking through NLP technologies.
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Íñigo Caínzos (Cadena SER)
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Alfonso Pato (elDiario.es)
Journalist and cultural manager. Founder and director of the Cans Film Festival since 2004, he has worked in numerous media outlets.
He holds a degree in Hispanic Philology from USC. He has over 35 years of experience as a journalist and director of cultural programs on television, as well as in the management of cultural projects. He has worked at Televisión de Galicia (TVG), Televisión Española (TVE), the newspaper El País, and currently contributes to the culture and society section of El Diario.es, where he has also written articles on AI.
He has conducted talks on various cultural topics at European universities such as Université Sorbonne-Paris 8, Universidad de Deusto (Basque Country), Universidade Católica Portuguesa do Porto (Portugal), University of Saint Louis (Madrid Campus), and in events organized by the Ministry of Culture, Junta de Extremadura, and the Principality of Asturias.
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Guillermo Infantes (Newtral)
Guillermo is a journalist and is 30 years old. He is part of the fact-checking team at Newtral.es, and his work focuses on detecting and monitoring disinformation on social media, with a special emphasis on coordinated campaigns and foreign interference operations in the field of information (FIMI). He has taught geolocation and OSINT resources in the Master’s in Digital Verification, Fact-checking, and Data Journalism offered by Newtral and CEU-San Pablo University. He has also been a speaker at various forums, such as the Guardia Civil’s Summer Course on Intelligence and Security or the seminar Fighting Disinformation: National Security within the Framework of the EU Strategy at the University of Almería.
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César Rodríguez (La Voz de Galicia)
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Camilla Casula (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)