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. Check out my research interests for more.

I have published 140+ papers (including 50+ journal articles), which have been cited 5,500+ times (H-index = 37). I serve in the editorial boards of 7 journals (including IP&M, OSNEM, PeerJ Computer Science) and I'm a regular (S)PC member for conferences in computational social science (WWW, ICWSM, CSCW, WebSci), natural language processing (ACL, EMNLP, COLING) and artificial intelligence (IJCAI, AAAI, WSDM).

I'm currently involved in research projects totalling over £5M, including the HYBRIDS MSCA Doctoral Network (PI) and the AP4L project (CI).

Prospective PhD students: If you are interested in PhD supervision, please get in touch to discuss your interests and potential funding opportunities. Please make sure to send me a CV as well as your research interests.

News:

• 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"
• 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"

See older news