3rd International Workshop on Rumours and Deception in Social Media (RDSM)

December 13, 2020 in Barcelona, Spain
Collocated with COLING 2020

Abstract

The 3rd edition of the RDSM workshop will particularly focus on online information disorder and its interplay with public opinion formation.

Social media is a valuable resource for mining all kind of information varying from opinions to factual information. However, social media houses issues that are serious threats to the society. Online information disorder and its power on shaping public opinion lead the category of those issues. Among the known aspects are the spread of false rumours, fake news or even social attacks such as hate speech or other forms of harmful social posts. In this workshop the aim is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in social media mining and analysis to deal with the emerging issues of information disorder and manipulation of public opinion. The focus of the workshop will be on themes such as the detection of fake news, verification of rumours and the understanding of their impact on public opinion. Furthermore, we aim to put a great emphasis on the usefulness and trust aspects of automated solutions tackling the aforementioned themes.
Workshop Theme and Topics

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in social media mining and analysis to deal with the emerging issues of veracity assessment, fake news detection and manipulation of public opinion. We invite researchers and practitioners to submit papers reporting results on these issues. Qualitative studies performing user studies on the challenges encountered with the use of social media, such as the veracity of information and fake news detection, as well as papers reporting new data sets are also welcome. Finally, we also welcome studies reporting the usefulness and trust of social media tools tackling the aforementioned problems.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Detection and tracking of rumours.
Rumour veracity classification.
Fact-checking social media.
Detection and analysis of disinformation, hoaxes and fake news.
Stance detection in social media.
Qualitative user studies assessing the use of social media.
Bots detection in social media.
Measuring public opinion through social media.
Assessing the impact of social media on public opinion.
Political analyses of social media.
Real-time social media mining.
NLP for social media analysis.
Network analysis and diffusion of dis/misinformation.
Usefulness and trust analysis of social media tools.
Benchmarking disinformation detection systems.
Open disinformation knowledge bases and datasets.

Workshop Schedule/Important Dates

Submission deadline: 14th September, 2020
Notification of Acceptance: 30th October, 2020
Camera-Ready Versions Due: 21st November, 2020
Workshop date: 13th December, 2020

Submission Format

We will have a set of 8-10 presentations of peer-reviewed submissions, organised into 3 sessions by subject (the first two sessions about online information disorder and public opinion and the third session about the usefulness and trust aspects). After the session we also plan to have a group work (groups of size 4-5 attendances) where each group will sketch a social media tool for tackling e.g. rumour verification, fake news detection, etc. The emphasis of the sketch should be on aspects like usefulness and trust. This should take no longer than 120 minutes (sketching, presentation/discussion time). We will close the workshop with a summary and take home messages (max. 15 minutes). Attendance will be open to all interested participants.

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. Deviations from the provided templates will result in rejections without review. Submit papers by the end of the deadline day (timezone is UTC-12) via our Softconf Submission Site: http://softconf.com/coling2020/RDSM/

Download the MS Word and LaTeX templates here: https://coling2020.org/coling2020.zip

Selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions to the following special issue: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/special_issues/tackling_misinformation_online