*** Apologies for multiple postings ***
Third Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom (NLP4IF): Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda First Call for Papers Workshop website: http://netsci.montclair.edu/nlp4if/ Workshop Date: September 13, 2020 Co-located with COLING (https://coling2020.org/), Sep 13-18, Barcelona, Spain Supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, award No. #1828199 Submission deadline: May 20, 2020 (23:59 PM Pacific Standard Time) NLP4IF (http://netsci.montclair.edu/nlp4if/) is dedicated to NLP methods that potentially contribute (either positively or negatively) to the free flow of information on the Internet, or to our understanding of the issues that arise in this area, e.g. censorship, disinformation and propaganda, etc. We hope that our workshop will have a transformative impact on society by getting closer to achieving Internet freedom in countries where accessing and sharing of information are strictly controlled by censorship. The topics of interest include (but are not limited) to the following: - Censorship detection: detecting deleted or edited text; detecting blocked keywords/banned terms; - Identification of propaganda at different granularity levels: text fragment, document, and full website; - Disinformation/Misinformation detection: fake news, fake accounts, rumor detection, etc.; - Automatic detection of coordinated propaganda campaigns such as the use of social bots, botnets, and water armies; - Censorship circumvention techniques: linguistically inspired countermeasure for Internet censorship such as keyword substitution, expanding coverage of existing banned terms, text paraphrasing, linguistic steganography, generating information morphs etc.; - Detection of self-censorship; - Identifying potentially censurable content; - Identification of hate speech and offensive language; - (Comparative) analysis of the language of propagandistic and biased texts; - Automatic generation of persuasive content; - Automatic debiasing of news content; - Tools to facilitate the flagging, either automatic or manual, of propaganda and bias in social media; - Analysis of diffusion and consumption of propagandistic, hyperpartisan, and extremely biased content in social media; - Techniques to empirically measure Internet censorship across communication platforms; - Investigations on covert linguistic communication and its limits; - Identity and private information detection; - Passive and targeted surveillance techniques; - Ethics in NLP; - “Walled gardens”, personalization and fragmentation of the online public space; Multiple submission policy: papers that are under review in another COLING workshop at the time of submission will not be considered. We invite submissions of up to nine (9) pages maximum, plus bibliography for long papers and four (4) pages, plus bibliography, for short papers. The COLING’2020 templates must be used; these are provided in LaTeX and also Microsoft Word format. Submissions will only be accepted in PDF format. Formatting requirements: https://coling2020.org/coling2020.zip Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/coling2020/NLP4IF/ Important Dates * Submission deadline: May 20, 2020 (23:59 PM Pacific Standard Time) * Notification of acceptance: June 24, 2020 * Camera-ready papers due: July 11, 2020 * Workshop: September 13, 2020 Workshop organizers: Giovanni Da San Martino, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU. gmartino[at]hbku.edu.qa Chris Brew, Facebook. christopher.brew[at]gmail.com Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, University of South Florida. glc3[at]mail.usf.edu Anna Feldman, Montclair State University. feldmana[at]montclair.edu Chris Leberknight, Montclair State University. leberknightc[at]montclair.edu Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU. pnakov[at] hbku.edu.qa *Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia* ∙ glciampaglia.com Assistant Professor Computer Science and Engineering <https://www.usf.edu/engineering/cse/> ∙ University of South Florida <https://www.usf.edu/> *Due to Florida’s broad open records law, email to or from university employees is public record, available to the public and the media upon request.*
