PhD position: Hate speech detection
Job offer posted on 17 june 2022
DesCartes Program (Work Package 5) is looking for a PhD in Hate speech detection, as part of the DesCartes program, which aims to develop disruptive hybrid AI to serve the smart city and to enable optimized decision-making in complex situations, encountered for critical urban systems.
DESCARTES PROGRAM
The DesCartes programme is developing a hybrid AI, combining Learning, Knowledge and Reasoning, which has good properties (need for less resources and data, security, robustness, fairness, respect for privacy, ethics), and demonstrated on industrial applications of the smart city (digital energy, monitoring of structures, air traffic control).
The program brings together 80 permanent researchers (half from France, half from Singapore), with the support of large industrial groups (Thales SG, EDF SG, ESI group, CETIM Matcor, ARIA etc.).
The research will take place mainly in Singapore, at the premises of CNRS@CREATE, with a competitive salary and generous funding for missions.
Read more about the DesCartes program here.
DESCRIPTION
Hate Speech (HS) and harassment are particularly widespread in online communication, especially due to users’ freedom and anonymity and the lack of regulation provided by social media platforms. This phenomenon has determined a growing interest in using artificial intelligence and Natural Language Processing techniques to address social and ethical issues. An extensive body of work has been proposed to automatically detect HS relying on a variety of deep learning methods (Founta and Nunes, 2018; Schmidt and Wiegand, 2017).
Most research focus on HS as expressed in texts without taking into account the contexts in which they have been uttered. This PhD aims to bridge the gap by investigating for the first time how HS are expressed and detected in multi-party dialogues. We will propose new dialogue datasets for HS detection as well as new context-based deep learning methods that leverage the conversation thread to account for hateful contents and how they evolve as the dialogue proceeds.
EXPERIENCE & QUALIFICATIONS
Preferred :
– Master degree in Computer science with solid background in NLP and/or machine
learning
– A good experience in deep learning approaches for NLP
– Good programming skills in Python
References:
Paula Fortuna, Sérgio Nunes: A Survey on Automatic Detection of Hate Speech in Text. ACM Comput. Surv. 51(4): 85:1-85:30 (2018)
Anna Schmidt, Michael Wiegand: A Survey on Hate Speech Detection using Natural Language Processing. SocialNLP@EACL 2017: 1-10
Supervision:
Jian Su (Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR), Shafiq Joty (Nanyang Technological University, NTU) and Farah Benamara (Toulouse University)
Duration: 4 years
FURTHER INFORMATION & CONTACT
Salary range: Please find the allowances under COVERAGE at https://www.a-star.edu.sg/Scholarships/for-graduate-studies/a-star-cis-scholarship SINGA students may be offered the A*STAR Merit Award should they have stellar credentials and are recommended for the higher award by the final interview panel. Students under the AMA (A*STAR Merit Award) receive a monthly stipend of S$3,200.
Workplace Address: CREATE Tower (NUS Campus), 1 Create Way #08-01 Singapore 138602
Please send a short cover letter describing your suitability for the position, detailed CV with academic ranking (if any) and publication list, a concise description of research interests and future plans, and academic transcripts to:
– Jian Su
– Shafiq Joty
– Farah Benamara
We will begin reviewing applications for the positions immediately.