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COLING 2020 Third Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom (NLP4IF): Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda

First Call for Papers

Workshop website: http://www.netcopia.net/nlp4if/

Co-located with COLING 2020, Barcelona, Spain

Accepted papers will be published in the COLING 2020 NLP4IF Workshop Proceedings

Important Dates

* Submission deadline: September 1, 2020 (23:59 PM Pacific Standard Time)

* Notification of acceptance: October 1, 2020

* Camera-ready papers due: October 20, 2020

* Workshop: December 12, 2020

NLP4IF (http://www.netcopia.net/nlp4if/) is dedicated to NLP methods that potentially contribute or hamper the free flow of information on the Internet, their impact, and to our understanding of the issues that arise in this area. 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 controlled by any forms of censorship.

We invite submissions of up to nine (9) pages maximum, plus bibliography for long papers and four (4) pages, plus bibliography, for short papers. For full submission guidelines, please refer to the workshop homepage. The topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

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Censorship -

Censorship detection: detecting deleted or edited text; detecting blocked keywords/banned terms; -

Censorship circumvention techniques: linguistically inspired countermeasures 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 censorable content; -

Techniques to empirically measure Internet censorship across communication platforms; -

Investigations on covert linguistic communication and its limits; -

Disinformation -

Dis-/Misinformation detection: fake/false/impostor news, fake accounts, rumor detection, etc.; -

Propaganda -

Identification of propaganda at different granularity levels: text fragment, document, and full website; -

(Comparative) analysis of the language of propagandistic and biased texts; -

Automatic generation of persuasive 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 water armies; -

Analysis of diffusion and consumption of propagandistic, hyperpartisan, and extremely biased content in social media; -

Automatic debiasing of news content;

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Other relevant topics include ( but not limited to) -

Identification of hate speech and offensive language; -

Identity and private information detection; -

Passive and targeted surveillance techniques; -

Ethics in NLP; -

“Walled gardens”, personalization and fragmentation of the online public space.

Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/coling2020/NLP4IF/

Formatting requirements: https://coling2020.org/coling2020.zip

*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.*