Diesner lab to present research at computational social science conference

Members of Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner's Social Computing Lab will present a tutorial, paper, and posters at the 6th Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held virtually from July 17-20. The conference brings together academic researchers, industry experts, open data activists, and government agency workers to explore challenges, methods, and research questions in the field of computational social science.

Shubhanshu Mishra (PhD '20), doctoral candidate Rezvaneh Rezapour, and Diesner will teach a hands-on tutorial on tasks, data, and open source tools for information extraction from social media.

Doctoral student Kanyao Han will present the paper, "Human-in-the-Loop Construction of a Knowledge Base for Computer Science through Wikipedia," which he coauthored with Diesner, Mishra, Informatics doctoral student Pingjing Yang, and Kehan Li (BS '20, statistics and computer science). According to the researchers, domain-specific knowledge bases and vocabularies are useful for extracting information from text data, but because they are usually manually created by domain experts, they are costly and time-consuming. In this paper, the Diesner lab investigates how crowd-sourced data such as Wikipedia can be leveraged to build domain-specific vocabularies.

Posters to be presented will include:

  • "Adversarial Perturbations to Manipulate the Perception of Power and Influence in Networks" by doctoral students Nikolaus Parulian and Mihai Avram, MS/IM student Tiffany Lu, Mishra, and Diesner.
  • "How Does Situational Awareness of Emergencies Depend on Choices about Data Sources, Analysis Methods, and Implementation of Algorithms?" by doctoral student Ly Dinh, Informatics doctoral student Janina Sarol, and Diesner.
  • "Beyond Citation: Corpus-Based Methods for Assessing the Impact of Research Outcomes on Society" by Rezapour, Diesner and project collaborators from the Institute for the German Language (IDS), including Jutta Bopp, Norman Fiedler, Diana Steffen, and Andreas Witt.
  • "Assessing Balance in Signed Digraphs by Combining Balance and Transitivity" by Dinh, Rezapour, Diesner, and doctoral student Lan Jiang.
  • "Detecting Characteristics of Cross-Cutting Language Networks on Social Media" by Rezapour, Diesner, and doctoral student Jaihyun Park.
  • "Leveraging Topic Modeling to Enhance the Interpretability of Stance Detection" by doctoral student Apratim Mishra, Rezapour, Park, and Diesner.

Videos of the prerecorded presentations are available on the Social Computing lab website.

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