Second Call for Papers:
First International Workshop on Social Threats in Online Conversations: Understanding and Management (STOC 2020)
Full-day workshop at LREC 2020 | Marseílle France | May 11, 2020
Submission deadline: February 14, 2020 (see also Important dates below)
STOC website:
DESCRIPTION:
STOC 2020 is a one-day workshop focusing on research involving identification, understanding and management of social threats in online conversations. The workshop encourages discussions among researchers in various fields including NLP, computational linguistics, linguistics, computational sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology/conversation analysis, cybersecurity and social computing among others. The workshop schedule will consist of two keynote talks, a number of oral presentations, and a poster session. Depending on the volume of contributions, papers that describe systems or tools will be invited to give a demo of their system during the poster session. Additionally, a panel discussion is planned to discuss high-level questions about this evolving field, e.g., important near-term problems and types of shared tasks that drive the field.
Social threats for individuals and organizations are prevalent in online conversations, where human vulnerabilities pave the way for phishing, propaganda, scams, disinformation campaigns, and social engineering tactics (Bakhshi, Papadaki, and Furnell 2008, Karakasilitiosis, Furnell, and Papadaki 2006). For example, over 80% of cyber penetrations start with a social engineering attack (Verizon/TM 2014), often through manipulative language usage, resulting in a loss of money, sensitive information, or control of resources to unsuspecting victims at an individual level. Detection techniques based on metadata have yielded minimal success in the face of rising personalized attacks, especially those involving impersonation and power relationships (e.g., a spoofed dean requesting a gift card purchase from a department faculty). The implications are potentially more dire for disinformation campaigns, as these are implemented on a much larger scale. Natural language processing (NLP) and computational sociolinguistics techniques in conjunction with metadata analysis can provide a better means for detecting and countering attacks and disinformation campaigns in a wide variety of online, conversational contexts (Dalton et al 2019, Kim et al 2018, Dalton et al 2017, Sawa et al 2016). STOC is a venue for discussions on developing resources for and enabling NLP and computational sociolinguistics research on detecting and countering such attacks for a wide variety of online conversations.
TOPICS OF INTEREST:
The topics of the workshop include but are not limited to:
Development and evaluation of corpora to study social engineering threats and attacks in various forms of online communication, such as emails, SMS, slack, Whatsapp and LinkedIn
Development and evaluation of corpora to study large scale influence and disinformation campaigns targeting specific communities via social media
Challenges in developing corpora for social engineering attacks and disinformation campaigns
Advances in NLP for understanding online conversations and social engineering contexts, e.g., semantic parsing, information retrieval and question answering
Detection of social threats at different scales, e.g., from mass phishing attacks to targeted social engineering against individuals and businesses to sophisticated disinformation campaigns against entire populations
NLP based mitigation techniques for social engineering attacks (e.g., verification of provenance) and for disinformation campaigns (e.g., counter messaging)
Dialogue/narrative understanding and generation for bots to counter social engineering attacks
Strategies for countering unfolding disinformation campaigns to slow and stop their progress
Automatic detection of actions and intentions of participants in online conversations, e.g., the implied “ask” in the sentence Your votehere will result in eligibility for a $500 prize.
Automatic detection of the “provocation” underlying a disinformation campaign and the socio-cognitive vulnerabilities of the target population it aims to exploit
Natural language generation techniques to enable bot development for controlled, goal-directed and yet natural sounding conversations with potential adversaries and their followers
Active and passive defense mechanisms used for development of conversational bots
Risk and trust models for operating NLP bots with discretion and autonomy to engage with an adversary or an adversary’s followers
Persuasion techniques used in dialogue/narrative in social engineering contexts and in disinformation campaigns
Identification of attitudes that adversaries attempt to induce in targets for compliance
Techniques to induce attitudes in the adversaries or their followers, through a range of different counter measures
Social impact of disinformation campaigns, social engineering attacks, persuasion techniques, etc. using language and communication strategies
Evaluation of the impact of different types of social engineering attacks and disinformation campaigns
SUBMISSION DETAILS:
Both long (8pp) and short (4pp) papers are invited in all areas outlined in the Topics of interest as well as any related areas. A specific focus of STOC 2020 workshop is research on gleaning actions and intentions of adversaries in social engineering attacks from the adversaries’ language use as well as the content of communication with their targets.
All submissions are expected to describe original research. Long papers will preferably describe substantial and completed work, while short papers may present negative results, interesting application nuggets, a software package, or a small but focused contribution. There is no page limit for references. All submissions must follow the LREC Stylesheet which can be found here: . The papers will be submitted electronically in PDF format through the START conference manager page. All papers will be reviewed by three Program Committee members.
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones). See below for more information.
Ethics statement: As research/technology is developed to counter social threats/engineering, there are also potential malicious uses of the outcomes. Submissions to the workshop must include a brief statement about “ethical considerations” that addresses the potential for malicious use of the technology or other possible negative impacts and how these are mitigated.
LRE map: Describing your LRs in the LRE Map is now a normal practice in the submission procedure of LREC (introduced in 2010 and adopted by other conferences). To continue the efforts initiated at LREC 2014 about “Sharing LRs” (data, tools, web-services, etc.), authors will have the possibility, when submitting a paper, to upload LRs in a special LREC repository. This effort of sharing LRs, linked to the LRE Map for their description, may become a new “regular” feature for conferences in our field, thus contributing to creating a common repository where everyone can deposit and share data.
ISLRN: As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2020 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.
IMPORTANT DATES:
• Paper submission deadline: February 14, 2020
• Notification of acceptance: March 13, 2020
• Early-bird registration for the main conference and workshops: TBA
• Camera-ready papers: April 2, 2020
• STOC Workshop: May 11, 2020
INVITED SPEAKERS:
• Rosanna E. Guadagno, Director, Info Warfare WG at Center for International Security, Stanford
• Ian Harris, Professor of Computer Science, University of California Irvine
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
• Archna Bhatia (IHMC)
• Adam Dalton (IHMC & University of Florida)
• Bonnie Dorr (IHMC)
• Samira Shaikh (UNCC)
• Tomek Strzalkowski (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
• Ehab Al-Shaer (UNCC)
• Genevieve Bartlett (USC-ISI)
• Emily Bender (U Washington)
• Larry Bunch (IHMC)
• Esteban Castillo (SUNY Albany)
• Dave DeAngelis (USC-ISI)
• Mona Diab (GWU/Google)
• Sreekar Dhaduvai (SUNY Albany)
• Min Du (UC Berkeley)
• Maxine Eskenazi (CMU)
• William Ferguson (Raytheon)
• Mark Finlayson (FIU)
• Marjorie Freedman (USC-ISI)
• Bryanna Hebenstreit (SUNY Albany)
• Christopher Hidey (Columbia)
• Scott Langevin (Uncharted)
• Christian Lebiere (CMU)
• Kristina Lerman (USC/ISI)
• Fei Liu (UCF)
• Amir Masoumzadeh (SUNY Albany)
• Kathleen McKeown (Columbia)
• Alex Memory (Leidos)
• Chris Miller (SIFT)
• Mark Orr (University of Virginia)
• Ian Perera (IHMC)
• Alan Ritter (OSU)
• Emily Grace Saldanha (PNNL)
• Sashank Santhanam (UNCC)
• Sonja Schmer-Galunder (SIFT)
• Svitlana Volkova (PNNL)
• Ning Yu (Leidos)
• Zhou (Joy) Yu (UC Davis)
• Alan Zemal (SUNY Albany)
CONTACT:
Organizing Committee at stoc2020 [at] googlegroups.com