I am a lecturer (assistant professor) at Queen Mary University of London. I lead the Social Data Science lab. 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. Check out my research interests for more.
I have published 100+ papers (40+ journal articles), which have been cited 4,000+ times (H-index = 34). I serve as academic editor for 6 journals and I'm a regular (S)PC member for conferences in computational social science (WWW, ICWSM, CHI, CSCW), natural language processing (ACL, EMNLP) and artificial intelligence (IJCAI, AAAI).
News:
- 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"