Second Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom (NLP4IF): Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda
http://www.netcopia.net/nlp4if/
Date: November 3 or 4, 2019
Co-located with EMNLP-IJCNLP, Nov 3-7, Hong Kong
Submission deadline: August 19, 2019 (23:59 PM Pacific Standard Time)
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. We hope that our workshop will have a transformative impact on the society by getting closer to achieving Internet freedom in countries where accessing and sharing of information are strictly controlled by censorship.
NLP4IF will feature a shared task on propaganda detection in the news. The participants in the shared task will be invited to present their approaches at the workshop. More information on the task website (https://propaganda.qcri.org/nlp4if-shared-task/) and in a follow-up email.
The topics of interest include (but are not limited) to the following:
- Censorship detection: detecting deleted or edited text; detecting blocked keywords/banned terms;
- Censorship circumvention techniques: linguistically inspired counter-measure for Internet censorship such as keyword substitution, expanding coverage of existing banned terms, text paraphrasing, linguistic steganography, generating information morphs, etc.;
- Identification of propaganda at different granularity levels: text fragment, document, and entire website;
- Detection of self-censorship;
- Identification of potentially censorable content;
- Disinformation/Misinformation detection: fake news, fake accounts, rumor detection, etc.;
- 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;
- Automatic detection of coordinated propaganda campaigns such as the use of social bots, botnets, and Internet water armies;
- 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 for another EMNLP-IJCNLP workshop at the time of submission will not be considered.
Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2019/ws-NLP4IF
Formatting requirements: https://www.emnlp-ijcnlp2019.org/calls/papers#formatting-requirements
Important Dates
- Submission deadline: August 19, 2019 (23:59 PM Pacific Standard Time)
- Notification of acceptance: September 16, 2019
- Camera-ready papers due: September 30, 2019
- Workshop: November 3 or 4, 2019